by Adam Hall
'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 anymore.
'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.'
'Oh really?'
He didn't answer for a moment, hearing the acid tone. The streetlamp flickered again and this time went out, and we could see nothing now through the filth-covered windows of the bus. That was all right: it worked both ways. It's always a strain when the local director and his executive are holed up at a rendezvous, and tonight I was a distinct risk to Pringle: I'd been seen at the Khmer Rouge camp yesterday and was recognizable, even though my two executioners manques were no longer a threat. I couldn't show myself at the Hotel Lafayette or invite Pringle to my safe-house either, and the bus was the best place I could find; it was in deep shadow and didn't interest anybody at night, though in the daytime it was a playground for children: there was a small rubber flip-flop in the gangway, and a broken toy gun - of course, we must train them young - on one of the ripped stained seats.
'You located the opposition's base,' Pringle said in a moment, 'and infiltrated it, bringing out valuable information as to personnel and equipment. In addition –' he broke off as three shots sounded in the distance from two different guns, some kind of shoot-out, par for the course in exotic Pouthisat. 'In addition,' Pringle went on, 'you confronted a high-ranking officer of the Khmer Rouge and can recognize him again. I think Mr. Flockhart would certainly wish me to signal him.'
An apple for the teacher - he sounded just like that bastard Loman. 'I found the camp,' I said, 'but I'd imagine quite a few people in this town know it's there, other than the Khmer Rouge. They know how to keep secrets in this place.'
'Possibly so,' Pringle's voice came from beside me - we were sitting in the pitch dark now - 'but despite their ability to keep secrets, we know the camp is there now, and that's rather more important.'
Had a point but I wasn't in the mood to admit it; he was so bloody reasonable, wouldn't give me a chance to spill my guts - some directors are like that, they don't realize the shadow needs to debrief what's on his mind as well as the information he's picked up.
'Then tell Flockhart,' I said, 'make his day. You'd also better tell him there are two more down.' I hadn't said anything in my debriefing about getting clear of the camp: it wasn't usable information; but we're always expected to report it if we put someone down.
'Very well,' Pringle said, and I heard him move, crossing his legs or something. 'This was in self-defence?'
'Call it that.'
In a moment, 'Was it? Or was it not? I'm sorry to –'
'The first one, yes, I couldn't have done anything if I hadn't put him down right away - they both had loaded assault rifles. I could have got away from the second one by knocking him cold, but I'm not sure he would've thanked me - with no surgeons in this place his legs would've been paralyzed for life.'
'I see. But during the confrontation, he had been attempting to kill you, is that right?'
'Yes.'
'Then London will be perfectly satisfied.'
It was no big deal, but the hierarchy upstairs starts worrying if any particular shadow reports too many people down during the course of his mission: for some among us the taste of blood can become addictive, though I've never fancied it myself.
'Well and good,' I said.
'And I understand perfectly.' He didn't.
'Look, they were soldiers, weren't they? Aren't soldiers expected to give their lives for the cause?' My voice hadn't got louder; it just had an undertone and I couldn't do anything about it.
Pringle shifted slightly on the seat towards me. 'Mr. Flockhart - not to mention the Minister of Defence in London and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington - would be delighted if you were to put down the entire Khmer Rouge army in Cambodia, so I wouldn't fret too much about the two you dealt with yesterday.'
So he did understand - he'd looked at my profile on the files in London rather carefully. Even in this most inhuman of all trades I've never taken a man's life without feeling another scar forming on the psyche, and this time I'd been able to sleep only because of the long black hairs caught in the bamboo, guilt relieved by rage.
In a moment I said, 'In any case, London won't know, will it?' Pringle had just said that London would be 'perfectly satisfied'. The streetlamp flickered into life again, and I turned my head to look at him. 'Or has that changed?'
'It was a generic term. I meant Control, not London, But since you ask, it may be that the Bureau will be brought into things, somewhere along the line.'
Oh really. I'd thought we were meant to be a one-man show, with Flockhart pushing a single pawn across the board towards the enemy lines. 'Why?' I asked Pringle.
'Let me clear up a few aspects of the debriefing,' he said, 'before we get to that. Do you mind?'
Kid gloves, and I didn't like it. At a debriefing the director calls the shots.
'No, but I'm not going to forget the question.'
'I'm quite sure. But in the meantime, tell me why you think the Khmer Rouge has established a camp in this area, not far from the town?'
'If they're planning some kind of assault on the nineteenth - or at any time - it'd give them a springboard.'
'An assault on Pouthisat?'
'On Phnom Penh. This is the nearest airfield from the capital to the west, where the main camp is supposed to be. And by road it's only a couple of hundred kilometres from the camp to Phnom Penh, if they want to transport troops en masse and by night.'
Pringle uncrossed his legs again, crossed them the other way.
I didn't like it that he was so restless; he hadn't been like this at the airport when we'd first met. But perhaps he was sitting on an exposed seat-spring, as I was.
'Do you believe an assault is imminent?' he asked me. 'As close as the nineteenth - in five days' time?'
'The men I saw at the camp were active, wearing battledress, moving vehicles around. But it could've been simply because Colonel Choen was there.'
'By "there,” do you mean paying a visit? Making an inspection? Or do you think he's based there?'
'I couldn't tell.'
'Make an educated guess.'
'I'd say he's visiting, just as he visited the people in Phnom Penh. Going the rounds, tightening security near the capital.'
'And then he'll report back to Pol Pot, in the west?'
'Just a gut feeling.'
'You've no actual –'
'Look, you asked me for an educated guess and you've got it.
Not at my best, no, but what do you expect, I'd done nothing useful yesterday, nothing, it didn't matter what Pringle said, he was just eager to signal Control with something, to show we were in business, but we weren't, not on any effective scale. Listen, what actually happened? I'd located a camp that half this town probably knew about and I'd got spat on by a street urchin in uniform and then led like a lamb to the bloody slaughter, and if it hadn't been for my training and experience this whole thing, Salamander, would have gone straight down the drain, finito.
'I'm sorry,' Pringle said. 'You're perfectly right.'
'Next question?'
He uncrossed his legs. 'I rather think that's all. Now tell me, have you any –'
'Why is it possible,' I asked him carefully, 'that the Bureau will be brought into things, somewhere along the line?'
'Ah, yes.' As if he'd quite forgotten. He hadn't. The streetlamp flickered and went out again, and I sensed that he was glad of it, didn't want me to see his eyes when he spoke. 'Nothing has changed, actually, no. Or not yet. We are still running a totally clandestine operation - not only vis-a-vis the Khmer Rouge but also the Bureau itself. But if you succeed in getting closer still to Pol Pot - to the man himself - your further actions might well involve the highest military authority in London and Washington.'
'They'd give me the battalion I asked for?'
'It's not quite like that.' He hitched himself towards me a little. 'Neither the CIA in the States nor DI6 in London is officially interested in what happens in Cambodia at the present moment. There are too many other turbulent theatres of unrest engaging their attention both in Europe and Asia. But if it were known with certainty that Pol Pot means to make a final attempt to seize power again, and has the capacity, there might be a decision by shall we say - the more covert factions of government in Washington, London, Tokyo, Bonn and Paris to stop him - with or without reference to the United Nations.'
'By military force?'
'I suggest we leave that to them. The point is that when I say, "If it were known" that Pol Pot has this ambition, I clearly mean If you can find out. All we are asking you for, you see, is information, as I told you at the airport in Phnom Penh.'
'You don't think it's asking just a little too much,' I said, 'for one solitary spook to stand in for the CIA and DI6 because they're busy?'
'I also suggest we leave that to Mr. Flockhart.'
'What you want first,' I said as the streetlamp flickered into life again, 'is the precise position of the main Khmer Rouge camp in the jungle, somewhere west.' Because if this man was talking about 'highest military authority' and 'covert factions of government' he was talking about an air strike, and just because the US had brought coals on its head for doing it before, it didn't mean they wouldn't do it again if they thought it was necessary, history being repetitive.
'We would very much like to know, yes,' Pringle said, 'the precise position of the main KR forces. And we might assume that this would also give us the precise whereabouts of Pol Pot.'
'He's still the target.'
'Specifically. And you should bear that in mind.'
'Noted.'
'What the major democratic powers want to avoid, in fine, is the potential destruction of a further million Cambodians in new and improved killing fields, and the potential risk of Pol Pot's subsequent invasion of North Vietnam, which is at present militarily vulnerable, with the blessing and support - in terms of bargain-price material - of China, creating a Communist bloc.'
I gave it some thought for a moment and Pringle left me to it, shifting slightly away in a symbolic gesture of withdrawal. Through the filthy window I watched a dog crossing the waste-ground, dragging something heavy, some kind of food it had seized from somewhere, perhaps, and wanted to hide, its ribs showing and its legs buckling sometimes, forcing it to rest, its jaws still locked on the trophy, the means of maintaining life for a few more days. I couldn't see exactly what it was but it was angled like a human foot, deep crimson, almost black in the acid light of the streetlamp as the dog got up and went on again, dragging its spoils through the rubble.
'Is the prime minister,' I asked Pringle when I was ready, 'being kept informed?' The Bureau is directly and exclusively responsible to the PM in all its activities. Hence its ability not, virtually, to exist.
'I'm not sure,' Pringle said.
'You mean you don't know? Or you think so, but you're not sure?' It was important. If the PM was already aware of Salamander then we were operating close to the 'highest military authority' Pringle had mentioned.
'Frankly,' he said, 'I don't know. But let me put it this way: the moment you achieve any kind of breakthrough, the prime minister will indeed be informed that we have a mission running, and told the nature of the objective.'
'And will you let me know when that happens?'
'You have my word.'
'I want assurance,' I told him, 'that I can eventually get support on an effective scale if I need it, since I'm taking on an army.'
'And with the prime minister in the picture, that would of course be guaranteed. I understand.'
He was very understanding, was our Mr. Pringle, and he wore kid gloves and was stroking me with them. Why in God's name couldn't Flockhart have given me Ferris? Ferris or Pepperidge or even that bastard Loman, who at least has the grace to return my disregard. I don't like people who help me gently up the steps to the guillotine.
Pringle uncrossed his legs. 'Questions?'
'No. But you can get a couple of things for me. A Mine Action van and some field-glasses, 10 x 50s if possible, nothing less than 7.' He had a connection with Mine Action: they'd flown me out here from Phnom Penh.
'When do you need them by?'
'First light tomorrow.' I got off the seat and started down the aisle, and Pringle followed.
'May I ask what you have in mind?'
'I want to get close to Colonel Choen again - at the moment he's the only lead I've got. But this one's a long shot.' Pringle was waiting for me to tell him more, but I wasn't in the mood, didn't trust him yet.
As we dropped from the twisted step of the bus and kept to the shadow along the wall I heard him saying, 'Gabrielle Bouchard is in Pouthisat, did you know?'
I told him I didn't, and kept on walking. 'She's at the French Catholic Mission.'
'How is she?'
'Pretty well.'
I stopped just before the shadow of the wall came to an end.
'We break off here.'
'All right. So when do I expect a signal?'
'God knows,' I told him. 'As soon as I've got anything for you, that's all I can say.' Then I gave him the Church of Christ pamphlet the Caucasian woman had slipped through the open window of the Mazda. 'Get it to London for me. Wherever it can do the most good.'
Pringle looked at it briefly in the poor light. 'Oh, yes, we've all seen these. Unfortunately, it takes a political dissident's arrest to outrage the human rights groups. Driving children into brothels by the thousand doesn't worry them. But – ' he shrugged, putting the pamphlet away '– I'll see it reaches London, of course.' He melted into the night.
I would pass close to the French Catholic Mission on my way back to the safe-house
, so I made a detour by a couple of turnings and found the place and knocked at the door and asked if Gabrielle was there, but the nun said no, she'd been shot in the street half an hour ago.
Chapter 14
SNAKESKIN
'It could have been worse,' the black American nurse said. 'The bullet passed within a couple of inches of the liver, and this place ain't Bellevue, honey, there would have been nothing we could've done. C'mon in, this is what we call the intensive care unit, mostly for gunshot wounds and crashes and stuff, excuse the packing cases, we have to have something to sit on when our feet ache.'
An electric fan turned slowly overhead, fly-encrusted, wobbling, stirring the smells of blood, antiseptic and tobacco smoke. A young Vietnamese lay propped up on a dirty straw pillow, smoking - he was dying of tuberculosis, the nurse told me, so he was allowed two cigarettes a day to keep him from going crazy, and it smelled better anyway than most of the other things in this place. Her name was Leonora, she said, and she was from the Bronx.
'Fancy meeting you here,' I heard Gabrielle saying. She was in the end bed, half in shadow, her dark eyes luminous in her pale face, reflecting the kerosene lamp. She didn't smile, maybe couldn't.
'Don't do that!' Leonora told her as she tried to sit up. 'You can shake hands just the way you are, or kiss or whatever you have in mind.'
So I leaned down and kissed Gabrielle; her mouth was hot, moist, feverish. The nurse pushed a packing case across for me.