The jeep lost traction sometimes over the loose shale, skating at an angle and coming back as I shifted gears to get control; there were something like fifteen degrees of play in the steering box and it was tricky to keep this brute from Beijing on course. I was using third gear now, because -
Lights.
In the left-hand mirror, fanning between the hills behind and below me, flashing once as they came directly in line and then fading, blacked-out suddenly by a turn in the track. They would belong to a vehicle leaving the camp: all traffic on this route was strictly Khmer Rouge.
The major road to Pouthisat was still some way ahead, two miles, two and a half, and there wasn't a single chance of driving out of this. Their lights were in the right-hand mirror now, flashing again as they lined up, brighter this time. The crew on board had already found my jeep standing there and this one gone; they might have stopped long enough to take a look around and seen the two soldiers lying there among the rocks. They would therefore be driving flat out and with purpose, and even if I got to the major road before they did I'd be within range of their guns, finito.
The terrain was steeper here, with rifts and gullies filled with shadow in the peripheral glow of my lights, and I began watching for somewhere to ditch.
There might of course be nowhere — I might simply have to stop this thing and get out and walk, run, while there was time. Question: how long would it take those people behind me to raise the alarm and bring a search party of a hundred men here in packed transports, two hundred, five?
The jeep was skating again and I shifted down and got traction. Light came suddenly and in all three mirrors this time as the track ran straight for a while. They'd closed the distance by half, by more than half: their lights were throwing shadows now from the rear window of the jeep.
Then I saw the gully leading away from the track, deeper than a gully, a small ravine, and steep, and I waited until the lights behind me were blacked-out by the rocks and then wrenched the jeep into a spin with the power still on and sent it towards the slope, dousing the headlights and hitting the brakes and jumping clear with enough momentum left in the thing to take it to the bottom of the ravine.
I was lying flat among boulders when the Khmer transport came storming past, and as soon as its lights had died away I stumbled down to the jeep. It had rolled twice, and one wheel was still turning slowly in the moonlight. I took the flashlamp out of its bracket and found the last bottle of water lying among the rocks and picked it up and took it with me as I moved higher, away from the track.
The moon was down, and in the east a pale flush of light threw the length of a mountain ridge into silhouette. Below and to the west the valley was lost beneath a veil of mist. A bird called, piping thinly in the silence.
I hadn't slept. The Khmer transport that had gone storming past the place where I had ditched the jeep had driven as far as the major road and turned north towards Pouthisat; after a while it had returned and plunged into the valley, following the track to the camp. Within thirty minutes the lights of a dozen vehicles had come swinging east towards the major road, half of them turning north and the others south to take up the hunt. It was long after midnight when I saw them again, threading their way through the valley back to the camp.
I had lain down, then, using the half-empty plastic bottle for a head-rest, listening to the silence that had now come down front the hills to rest along the valley floor. But sleep was out of my reach. Bruises from unremembered blows were throbbing now; injuries I had not been aware of were bringing pain, demanding my attention. And there were thoughts running wild in my head, disallowing peace, baying like hounds at the kill.
Later I would have to deal with them.
When the flush of light in the east became strong enough to cast shadows I finished the last of the water and left my shelter in the rocks to climb into the eye of the sun towards the road.
13: DEBRIEFING
'And your wife?' I asked the man with no teeth.
He looked down. 'She dead,' he said in halting French.
So I didn't ask directly about his sons, his other daughters.
'I'm sorry. There's just you and Cham?' It was short for Chamnan.
I had followed her home through the streets this morning, walking slowly. She was perhaps fifteen, though she looked more, hunger and shock and grief having wasted her small sharp-boned face. She was watching me now from the cramped little kitchen, her crutch leaning against the wall. By her eyes I saw she wasn't sure she wanted to share her home with a round-eye and his odd manners. I'd followed her because I needed a safe-house, and if she had a father or a mother they wouldn't favour the Khmer Rouge, wouldn't be informers. We'd had to pause several times, Cham and I, on our way here, because this one had gone off not long ago, maybe near her school, and she was still trying to get used to the crutch — it was rubbing under her arm, and the rag she was using to cushion it kept shifting.
'Yes,' her father said — there was just himself and Cham here in the house. It was on stilts and made of mud and bamboo, and he'd told me there were two rooms to spare and I could take either one. His sons, I supposed, or his two other daughters wouldn't be needing them any more.
'I don't want,' I told him, 'to be talked about. Do you understand that?'
He looked surprised. All the round-eyes he'd seen hadn't minded in the least being talked about; they'd come into his country with their good new clothes and stout boots and loud voices and treated him and his neighbours rather like children. I thought I'd better spell it out for him.
'I don't want anyone in the Khmer Rouge to know where I am.'
He frowned, then nodded quickly, looking across at Chain and saying something in Khmer, his tone emphatic. 'She understands?' I asked him.
'Yes. We not talk about you. She can keep secrets. All my people know how to keep secrets.'
'Of course.' I offered him 2,000 riel per day for my board, and he was pleased, glancing quickly around the room as if he'd never realized its value.
I slept through the heat of the day on the bamboo bed in the room I'd chosen; there was no other furniture in it except for a chest of drawers made from packing cases still with their Oxfam labels on them. This had been another daughter's room; there were long black hairs still caught in the split ends of the bamboo behind the straw-filled pillow, and even though I'd been awake all night, sleep didn't come easily, or soon. In none of the missions I'd so far worked had I felt anything in particular about the opposition: they had simply represented the target, the objective. The Khmer Rouge was different, and when the first wave of sleep came over me it was borne on a dark, tugging undertow of rage.
On a patch of waste-ground near the railway station there was a bombed-out bus with Kanipong Chhnang still readable on the side, and I stood in the shadows watching it. The streetlamp on the corner was flickering the whole time as the power station struggled to cope with the load. Voices came from the cafe down the street, and a Mine Action van turned the corner and came past, its lights throwing the rubble on the waste-ground into sharp relief. Then Pringle arrived, dead on the minute, not looking around him as he skirted the building on foot and got into the bus, experienced enough to rely on me to have screened the area beforehand.
'So we've got something now,' he said when I'd finished debriefing, 'for London.'