They stopped only twice along the road. The first at the sound of a bang so loud they were sure that either the tyres or the engine had exploded though neither had and the second time to rescue the Dutchman’s holdall as it bounced straight out of the open roof and into the wild undergrowth.
They saw no wildlife for nearly seven miles, such was the unexpected and ungodly sound of their approaching as all birds and jungle critters dispersed long before their arrival.
As the road emerged from the other end of the deep jungle they emerged with it, their transport miraculously intact but for the mess inside and some damage to the wheels and bearings if nothing else.
The ground calmed onto an orange dust track that wound around the edge of the hills and the Mekong again revealed itself below.
River vessels glided silently up and down shipping goods and people in both directions.
On the far side stood Myanmar, one of the least trekked and hardest to enter nations to have ever existed.
“So now what?”
The American pulled the Jeep across onto the side of the track with its nose pointing towards the steep riverbank, the road continuing away to the west. The dust clouded and swirled and settled again. The Dutchman kicked the passenger door open and stretched himself out and stood and regarded the view across into nomansland with his hands on his hips.
“There isn’t a way across man if that’s what you’re thinking, that’s the point entirely” the American called from behind the wheel.
The kid stepped out of the car and rounded the front of it and opened up the rugged map onto the hot bonnet of the Jeep. His hands touched the metal and recoiled at the heat.
He tracked the road or what he thought was the road with his finger, a thin red line from Muang Sing towards the river until it reached what he though was their approximate location. He looked around for some clue.
A muntjack had darted into the road and stood for a moment watching them with wide eyes and the unsureness of a thing that lived in a world free from people and maps and big hissing American 4x4s. It took in what it could in the briefest of moments and darted again into the bushes and away.
“We’re somewhere along this stretch here, outside of Zieng Kok” he stroked across the map with his fingertip, “where the track bends west along the Mekong”
It had been very clearly explained and as well understood that there was no bridge and no ferry and no point in the river safe enough to swim nor indeed any welcome on the other side either.
The American was standing at the top of the bank with a cigarette between his lips and one hand rubbing his shaved head slowly.
“I’m sure we could swim it though, huh?”
He nodded to himself and replied to his own question.
“We could”
The Dutchman wiped the beads of sweat from his eyes with his thumb.
“If you swam across there you’d drag yourself out the other side with nothing but a thousand mile walk”
The American thought about this for a while.
“We need the car, man” he said calmly, not breaking stare from a passing boat.
The kid was watching it too.
“That’s what we need there”
“We need a boat we can get this thing on though” said the Dutchman kicking the tyre of the Jeep with the toe of his boot.
“Ain’t no-one giving us no ride ‘cross there, man, and you know it”
“So we find our own boat then, no?”
They watched each other for a moment.
“We’ll have to take one”
They stood across from each other in the dust as if they were in a standoff though none held guns.
The kid was perched up on the cooling bonnet of the car.
“So that’s what we do”
Both airmen looked at him not expecting this boldest of statements from apparently the least bold of their party.
“We have come this far haven’t we? We made the decision a long way back up that road, if there was a decision to be made, that we were coming this way and crossing this river and going home”
Neither of them spoke.
The kid continued.
“If we go back we go north into China, and the road through the Himalayas is longer than we even know, there’s no guarantee of anything whatsoever. This isn’t something any of us exactly planned for and we have to accept that. We play the cards in our hand. So if we’re going across Myanmar, we’re going across that river. There aren’t any bridges and they certainly don’t want us in there”
He bounced down off the car onto his feet.
“So let’s get ourselves a boat”
The sun had passed behind the hills and the world was slowly slipping into slumber. Birds once busy chattering away in daysong had all but ceased their tunes and in their place a new cacophony of insects and night creatures had started its chorus. It had taken a lot longer than they had thought to climb the Jeep down onto the beach and the car had nearly slipped into the water below on a number of occasions. It sat in the evening cool under the cover of palm leaves and branches which they had placed across the metalwork to hide the shine of the moon from anyone who cared to look over to them.
The Dutchman was sitting on a rock in the shallows washing his vest in the cool water and the American was drifting into sleep propped up against a tree, smoking, three empty beer bottles at his side. The kid watched them from where he sat some fifty yards upriver and he saw the American jolt awake when the cigarette dropped from his lips onto his bare stomach. He batted it away before sinking back down as before. The kid smiled to himself.
In the distance through the deep purple and red sunset four silhouetted helicopters flew over in formation like geese flocking.
He was filled with a resolute determination as he looked across the Mekong to the opposing jungleland. Somewhere off in that direction across continents and across all that he didn’t know stood all that he did. But he knew then that those things would not be the same as when he left them. The world was crashing and this was unavoidable. He felt very scared sitting in that spot not knowing at all what lay ahead of him and on the doorstep of some land he was about to try to cross in shadow and secrecy. What would exist on the other side of that river or on the other side of that was not to be known but he had absolute determination to get there and to get back to Europe and to London and to Abi. He was lost in this thought for some time as the sky grew darker until at once he stood sharply from his rock and stared intently upstream.
He whistled sharply through his teeth and the two airmen downstream snapped to attention.
A long wooden barge coasted silently towards them from the shadows, a single spotlight fixed to the front illuminating the water.
The American moved back into the trees to the Jeep and the Dutchman waded out into the water and waved his vest round above his head like a cowboy with a lasso, water spinning from it in every direction.
“Help” he called out, not knowing whether the driver of the barge would hear or understand.
Upstream the driver of the barge saw this sight ahead of him and slowed the motor of his boat and watched from the dark.
While somewhat wary of the strange man halfdressed and standing in the river in the dark calling to him, it was the absurdity of the situation that caused him to be less vigilant than he ought to have been and he slowly banked the long vessel across the water towards the Dutchman.
“Help me” the Dutchman continued to shout.
As the boat veered closer to the shore the Dutchman dove forward into the water and swam across to meet it, gliding up to the side of the wooden hull and holding on to it with his fingertips. The man left the wheel and rushed forward throwing a short length of rope into the water for him to grab. The Dutchman took it and with the help of the struggling captain pulled himself aboard, dripping the black water onto the wooden deck.
The kid watched the two silhouettes from where he stood as the Dutchman rose slowly to hi
s feet. He took a moment’s pause in the dark to gather himself then leaped straight at the captain and bundled him to the floor. He used the captain’s own rope to bind him and tie him to the side struts of the deck and the captain kicked and shouted but he couldn’t get loose.
By the time this scene had unfolded and the Dutchman stood behind the wheel of the boat it was some way downriver and at a ninety degree angle to the flow and the Dutchman fought against the current and struggled to right the vessel to face it back west the way it had come. It drifted still backwards as he familiarised himself with the boat’s controls and finally mastered the throttle.
The kid started running back along the rocky shoreline to join the American where he stood at the edge of the water as the wooden barge finally came to life and, with a growl and a huge churning of water, it proceeded to slug slowly back upriver against the current. The captain sat tied to the fencing with the fat wet rope kicking and wriggling and shouting.
The Dutchman brought the boat as close as he could to the beach and unbuckled the steel loading hatch and opened out the front panel into the water. The American had brought the Jeep out into the open on the muddy riverbank and sat at the wheel trying to think.
“Turn it sideways again” he shouted to the boat.
At the wheel the Dutchman hadn’t heard him and the kid repeated the request to him again from the water’s edge.
The Dutchman threw up his hands.
“It won’t just turn sideways” he shouted back.
The kid relayed the comment back to the Jeep.
The American sat there watching.
The boat was twenty feet from the shore facing east, the opened loading hatch at the front hanging down into the river allowing the black water to lap up onto the wooden decking.
The kid looked between them waiting for the next to speak but neither did.
“We’re going to have to hurry, this couldn’t be a more obviously fucked situation”
The captain continued to wriggle and shout in his shackling.
The Dutchman started to round the boat so that the front faced the beach though the water between the two was still too deep to drive into and the kid waved his hands to signal the boat closer to the shoreline.
As the open front of the barge turned towards the shore the American fired the Jeep up and revved at the engine.
“Get in now” he yelled to the kid.
The kid ran towards the Jeep just as the front of the boat turned into position. The American pressed the accelerator down and the wheels span in the mud and sand before gripping and launching it forwards, roaring into the water and straight at the hull of the boat. The Jeep crashed through the surf and smashed onto the steel hatch hanging down from the front of the barge throwing the nose of the car upwards and crashing the front wheels down onto the deck. Both wheels splintered straight through the wood into the hull while the back two hung down into the water. The captain had stopped struggling in the ropes and sat watching wide-eyed in astonishment at what unfolded before him. The weight of the Jeep hinged entirely on the two wheels which were down into the deck to their arches and were pulling the wood up from its nails. The American leaped out from the Jeep with the kid as both it and the boat creaked and moaned and the two men tried with everything they had to keep the car from crashing backwards off the boat and into the river.
They knew it would indeed be nothing short of disastrous if they were left in this jungle with neither car nor boat.
The Dutchman left the controls of the barge which was now coasting slowly backwards at an angle under no control at all and rushed to the young Burmese captain where he sat. He quickly untied the poor man and hauled the heavy rope over to the car, strapping it through the front towbar at one end and around the boat’s driver cabin at the other.
“Is it secure?” yelled the kid over the noise.
The Dutchman heaved with both hands to tighten the rope and the knot as much as he could.
“I don’t think so” he called.
“Turn us around” called the American frantically, pulling their packs from the Jeep out onto the deck of the barge. He span the wheel and the boat started to spin gently round on the spot, the Jeep’s weight straining the rope and breaking apart the wooden decking. As they finally turned to face downriver again the Dutchman put the boat forward into the dark water, pushing the car along in front of them.
“My god man, if anyone sees this”
The power of the boat, while nothing remarkable, was enough to keep the car half out of the water and push it forward. River water began to gush upwards onto the open deck of the boat.
“Get us to the other side” called the American.
“I can’t, look” the Dutchman replied, pointing across the river.
The far side of the river was overgrown and trees and bushes hung out over the water making it impossible to get the vessel to the shoreline.
“We’re going to have to find a place downriver of here, just make sure that Jeep doesn’t end up underwater”
The American scoffed and threw up his hands.
“How?” he muttered, half to himself.
He looked back just in time to see the young Burmese captain leap over the side of the barge into the water below and swim away as fast as he could. None of them had a chance of stopping him and within seconds he had disappeared from view entirely into the night.
“Now we have even less time, what do you think he’s going to do when he reaches help?”
The question didn’t require a response for all three knew exactly what he would do. The Dutchman pushed down the throttle and more water poured on to the deck.
The kid shook his head.
It could be all over before it even started.
They managed somehow, possibly through divine assistance, though none of them thought it deserved, perhaps rather through some other set of wild coincidences, to coast a couple of miles downriver with the boat and the car still tied together and the boat still on the correct side of the water until lights appeared on the Burmese shoreline to the south.
The American motioned backwards to the boat’s new Dutch captain and the boat was slowed to a crawl. The entire front section of the barge was in the river and much of the inside of the Jeep was full of water too.
“If there’s a town over there then there must be a road to it” he called to the kid and waved the Dutchman across to the side.
The Dutchman was having problems getting the boat to turn due to the weight of the Jeep and the profuse flooding now at its front end. He wrestled with the wheel and the boat started to tilt, gliding at an angle towards the shrubby bankside. As it neared the shore the Dutchman tried in vain to throw the boat into reverse to slow it and the bottom of the boat scraped across the rocks on the river bed, disturbing the delicate relationship the boat cabin and the rope and the Jeep were currently enjoying together. The wooden panelling of the barge’s cabin started to pull away from its fittings and was splintering the timber.
The smell of diesel filled the air as the boat poured black fumes into the already black night.
just a few feet to go the tension finally gave and the relationship fractured completely. The entire front section of the cabin crashed apart and exploded up into the sky, freeing the rope which whistled forwards as the Jeep smashed through the deck of the barge and into the shallow water, breaking the beams of the deck wide open and allowing the black water to soar upwards onto the boat.
The American threw the kid’s rucksack across the deck to him and grabbed his own and the Dutchman’s and leaped over the side of the boat into the water. The kid followed him overboard and lastly the Dutchman did too.
They had just reached the muddy shore and got to standing when the boat finally gave and tipped completely backwards into the water and started to sink. The Jeep, as the malign architect of the situation sat proudly on the rocks submerged only to just below its arches, facing the boat as it went down. It glistened proudly in the cryst
al moonlight, intact but for the front grille, black water dripping from every part of it.
They stood silently and watched as the barge slipped downwards into the blackness and neither man said anything for a moment and all that could be heard in that place was the bubbling of the boat going down.
The American stepped slowly forwards through the shallow to the car. He pulled open the door and water rushed out.
“If that thing starts I’ll be goddamned”
He leaned into the soaking cab and turned the key which had been in the ignition the entire time. The starter motor chattered and spat.
“It’s full of water you idiot” called the Dutchman.
He turned it again and it coughed some more like an animal choking. He climbed up onto the wet leather seat and pushed at the pedals as he did so.
“Let it dry out some” called the Dutchman again.
He started to pick up his pack from the shallows and was looking around for an exit strategy when the Jeep spat again and with a deafening bang regained its life as the engine turned over.
The American laughed loudly.
He jumped out of the car with one fist triumphantly in the air.
The kid shook his head and looked at the Dutchman with a soft smile.
“Can you believe that?”
“Damn American engineering too” he replied, shaking his head.
The American thumped the bonnet with his fist, laughing.
“Well, it’s better than its Burmese counterpart over there” the kid said, nodding towards the water.
A few feet away the final part of the river barge was just disappearing into the murk of the Mekong.
Chapter Three
Somewhere outside Kenglan to Wang Singpin
They climbed the Jeep off the beach up the bank through the shrub onto the plateau above. There was no track and the land was overgrown but it was sparse enough for them to drive through, weaving slowly between the trees in the dark, the headlights low to hide themselves from anyone who may be there. They knew the captain of the barge would have surely reached that town or another like it and they knew also that when local authorities heard from him that two foreign servicemen and their accomplice had tied him up and hijacked his boat and then smashed it apart trying to haul a Jeep with Thai licence plates across the river that it wouldn’t sit too well with them at all.
Where Men Once Walked Page 4