Temple of Gold

by A. J. Stewart

  “I’m still no wiser as to why we’re helping this guy.”

  “The propaganda back home would have you believe that there is this singular thing called ‘communism’ that is the scourge of the devil. But that’s not the case.”

  “You’re pro-communism?”

  “No, Lenny, I’m not. But what I’m saying is there are different flavors of communism. Hard to believe, but some communists think the Soviets are communism-lite.”

  “Communism-lite? Like a good version?”

  “Depends on your position. But that was Pol Pot. There was a schism between the communists in Vietnam and those in Cambodia—in the same way there are philosophical differences between the Soviets and the Chinese. See, Pol Pot was hardcore. He wanted an agrarian-based society where everyone toiled in the fields to grow the food they needed. He even did away with currency.”

  “He still sounds like the bad guy.”

  “Lenny, what I’m saying is, he is a bad guy. But politically he was aligned with the Chinese. And the Chinese have been smart enough to keep their heads down the whole time things have been escalating between the US and the Soviet Union. But in time, the Khmer Rouge grew belligerent toward Vietnam. Ethnic Vietnamese in the east of Kampuchea were summarily slaughtered. The Khmer Rouge believed that the Mekong Delta area in Vietnam was traditional Khmer land and made plans to take it back. They even announced on Phnom Penh radio that if every Kampuchean soldier killed twenty Vietnamese they could eliminate the entire population. Eventually it became too much. Kampuchean resistance forces made up of both communists and non-communists joined with the Vietnamese to overthrow the Khmer Rouge and take Phnom Penh. Even though it was technically an invading force, like the Khmer Rouge four years before, the Vietnamese-backed army was cheered into the capital because of the brutality of Pol Pot’s regime.”

  “Okay, Alice, I think you should stop talking now. I thought we were backing the wrong horse before, but now I’m convinced of it.”

  “That’s the thing, Lenny. Maybe we are. But in a two-horse race, you have limited options. What it comes down to is this: The current regime in Kampuchea is backed by the Vietnamese and through them, the Soviets. That makes them bad in the eyes of the administration. The State Department and our United Nations reps have rejected any notion that this regime be given international recognition. The former head of state, Prince Sihanouk, has lobbied on behalf of a coalition that includes some former Khmer Rouge, that they are the legitimate government. So far they have received that recognition in the UN, even though the prince is in exile and the Khmer Rouge is in hiding.”

  “So you’re saying we are helping one of the worst mass-murderers of all time because we were embarrassed in Vietnam?”

  “That probably plays more of a part than it should, but that’s not the official reason. The official answer is that the Vietnamese-backed regime is a tool of the communist Soviet Union, and the friend of my enemy is my enemy.”

  “We don’t like them because they are supported by communists, but the guys we are supporting are also communists.”

  “But not Soviets. The Soviets have nukes. The Chinese—well, they have done tests, but we’re confident their nukes aren’t pointed at us. Nor have they made designs on spreading their form of communism across the world.”

  “Yet,” said Lenny with a shrug. “Meanwhile the people in Cambodia or Kampuchea or whatever you guys are calling it now are stuck in the middle.”

  “I know, Lenny. I don’t like it at all. It’s easy when it’s just lines on a map. But there are always people on the ground that we don’t see on the map.”

  “Well I’ve seen them, Alice. And here’s where it really doesn’t make sense. You think we’re trying to rearm the Khmer Rouge so they can take back the country?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So what are we doing?”

  “I think the answer lies in diplomacy. It might take time, but we have to find a solution that doesn’t cede ground to the Soviets but helps to end the bloodshed.”

  “That’s the Justice Department’s position?”

  “The DoJ’s is that we should not break international law or treaties, or have citizens doing the same.”

  “What’s the CIA angle then?”

  “To destabilize the current regime. We can’t win a war—the Khmer Rouge are too depleted and half their leaders swapped to the other side. The locals hate them because of the atrocities. So the CIA angle is to destabilize, using whatever army they can find.”

  “Well, they’re out of luck.”

  “How so?” Alice sipped her coffee but found it had gone cold.

  “I saw the drop, and I saw what Ventura didn’t see. I saw this army, so-called.”

  “So?”

  “This was no army. These were guys on death’s door. They were malnourished and slow. And they weren’t carrying guns. They were carrying shovels and picks. They were covered in dirt. They looked like miners, not soldiers.”

  “Didn’t Ventura give them guns?”

  “He gave them a lot of things, guns included. But the guns didn’t get passed around. They barely got looked at. They were loaded up and driven away. The main load was rice.”

  “Rice?”

  “Yeah. Bags of rice delivered to a village surrounded by rice paddies.”

  “Maybe their rice isn’t growing.”

  “I don’t think it is, because I don’t think they’re farming it. At least not enough of it to feed themselves. If I had to guess, I’d say it was all for show.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea. But why would we give General Tan metal detectors?”

  “To find landmines. Tens of thousands of them were probably planted out there.”

  “And what about Geiger counters?”

  Alice frowned. “Geiger counters? That’s probably just paranoia. They’re issuing them to elementary schools back home, in the event of a strike.”

  “Have things gotten that bad?”

  “Depends who you talk to. Reagan and Brezhnev hated each other. But the Soviet Union stagnated under Brezhnev and that was good for us. But this new guy, Andropov? He’s not the same, he’s a realist. He’s cleaning out the deadwood and the corruption, which sounds good, but it creates instability. Our analysts in Germany say that Andropov knows that his economy is collapsing. He can’t win an arms race. Word is that he’s prepared to deal with Reagan, but he has to placate hardliners in his politburo. He might revive detente, but it hasn’t happened yet. So elementary schools have Geiger counters.”

  “Do you know any Soviet diplomats? What do they say?”

  “I do. And they say there are a lot of proud men in positions of power, and pride and power equal hubris.”

  “Geez Louise.”

  “But they also believe that both sides understand that a first strike equals a counterstrike, and they know that those strikes won’t happen on some far-flung battlefield. They’ll happen in Moscow and Washington and Leningrad and New York City. And that’s not just suicide—to these guys it’s worse. It’s political suicide.”

  “So in the meantime, we just keep killing the little guys, one at a time.”

  Alice frowned and nodded. “You want to know what’s going on out there?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Sure. But do you?”

  Lenny breathed in deeply. “Are you asking if I want to know or if I want to do something about it?”

  “I’m asking do you want full information?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Then I know a guy you should meet.”

  Chapter Five

  Lenny didn’t have to go far. Alice showered and got dressed and headed for work while Lenny sat in her robe at the breakfast bar. He made a phone call and then showered. The only clothes he had were his dress blues, which he had hung up despite the previous evening’s adventures, so he donned a pair of boxer shorts and walked down the stairs and onto the street.

  A barefoot, bare-chested, p
ants-less man with a farmer’s tan and flaming red hair was not an everyday occurrence in Bangkok, especially in the Embassy District, but Bangkok was a city accustomed to the unusual. Lenny avoided the malls and name-brand stores on the main roads, instead cutting into the lanes where he found a shop that provided him with a blue button-up shirt and a pair of khakis. The store next door provided a pair of brown walking shoes that would have cost ten times as much in San Diego.

  More appropriately dressed, Lenny continued down Rama IV Road. His appointment wasn’t until just before lunch, so he followed the line of young men and women headed for the urban campus of Chulalongkorn University. It wasn’t a campus in the classic Harvard sense. Its location among the embassies and corporate offices gave it a disjointed feel, but the student union was a buzz. Lenny always felt energized by the vibe surrounding college campuses. People full of hopes and dreams, plans to change the world—sometimes for the better. They were places where ideas were discussed and dissected and discussed again. He liked that. Although he had chosen to attend the school of hard knocks, aka United States Marine Corps recruit training, he harbored a distant dream of attending college one day. Not the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and not any program simply to earn a piece of paper to get him an advancement or a job, but to learn something worth learning.

  Lenny found a small stall serving breakfast, so he ordered a plate of noodles with whitefish and a fried egg on top, sunny side up. He took a table among the students, broke the yolk, and ate slowly. He wasn’t much their senior, but at twenty-three, with almost six years in the Marines under his belt, they looked like kids to him. They hadn’t seen the things he had, and he supposed that was exactly how it was supposed to be. They were mostly destined for lives in cubicles, surrounded by sickly fluorescent lighting, driving nice cars and living in nice, comfortable homes. Lenny lived in solo billets or shared barracks, and had slept more than his share of times dug into a hole in the ground. He had never owned a car and had never owned a home. Perhaps one day he would, perhaps not. But he knew one thing for sure. His environment would kill these kids. And the environment they were aspiring to would kill him.

  Lenny found the Department of Anthropology a few minutes before his appointed time. The office was on the second floor. The stairs and hallway were linoleum and the doors were unpainted wood. There was no lobby and no security desk and no one to ask for directions, but the offices were all numbered rather than named, which made things easy to find in a military kind of way. He checked a board listing all the faculty and then knocked on the door he wanted, and was issued a high-pitched, “Come in.”

  The room inside looked like a poorly run library. There were books everywhere. Every wall space held shelves, and more books were piled into columns on the floor. A plain wooden desk took up the remainder of the space, and behind the desk sat a man with jet-black hair and a smile that could have lit a small town. He pushed his eyeglasses onto the bridge of his nose with his pointer finger, and then levered himself up from his chair and made to come around the desk.

  “Mr. Cox, yes?”

  “That’s right,” Lenny said. “Professor Ung?”

  “Of course, of course. Welcome.”

  Halfway around the desk, Ung found himself trapped behind a precarious column of books, so he simply pointed to a chair and retreated. Lenny edged along the desk to shake hands, and they sat.

  “You are a friend of Miss Brooks?” Professor Ung asked.

  “Yes, I am. She sends her regards.”

  “She is a very nice lady. She help me very much.”

  “She did?”

  “Oh, yes. When I go to United States for a conference. Because I am Cambodian, you see. They are very suspicious. But she helped me get my visa, and she write a nice letter for me to show when I arrive.”

  “She’s good like that.”

  “Oh, yes. And she introduce me to people at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. What a collection of museums. The most amazing place I have ever seen.”

  “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes. I like it very much.”

  “Well, thank you for seeing me, Professor.”

  “It is my honor to help a friend of Miss Brooks. So how can I help you, Mr. Cox?”

  “To be honest, Professor, I don’t really know. Alice—Miss Brooks—suggested that I speak with you.”

  “About what?”

  “I think, about the Khmer Rouge.”

  As Lenny suspected it might, the smile left Ung’s face. No one who had crossed paths with the Khmer Rouge had a good story to tell.

  “They are gone,” Ung said.

  “They are down, Professor, but they aren’t out.”

  “I have been gone eight years, Mr. Cox. So much has happened. I don’t see how I can help you.”

  “I don’t either, Professor. But Miss Brooks seemed to think you could.”

  Ung pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose again. “I will try.”

  “You are a professor of anthropology. What do you study?”

  “My specialty is archeology, specifically the study of extinct civilizations.”

  “Extinct civilizations? Like the Maya?”

  “A case in point, yes. But my interest is more in the Khmer Empire.”

  “As in the Khmer Rouge?”

  “No. This is a case of convenient appropriation. Many people in Cambodia are descendants of the empire, but the Khmer Empire, or as we call it—the Angkor Empire—was a civilization that once ruled over most of mainland Southeast Asia. The empire reigned from 802 AD to around 1431, some six hundred year.”

  “What happened to it?”

  The professor’s smile returned, albeit in a quizzical way. “No one really knows for sure. What cause any empire to end? More often than not, many things over many year, rather than one catastrophic event. Empires spread too far to be viable, rulers become vainglorious. Politics was a factor. We know toward the end rulers were often killed off by their challengers. In this case we also have religious transition, from a form of Buddhism to Hinduism and back again, which create social and religious turmoil, plus war and other usual causes. But at its peak, the Angkor Empire was as advanced a pre-industrial civilization as there ever was. You have heard of Angkor Wat?”

  “The temple, yes,” said Lenny. “I saw pictures in Time magazine.”

  “Well, what we see there is but a fraction of the city that once stood on the site from the eleventh century. We believe it to have been the largest city in the world at that time.”

  “It’s impressive.”

  “Sadly, under the previous regime it suffer greatly.”

  “So, Professor, do you know anything about a man called General Tan?”

  The man seemed to sink into his chair as his eyes skipped years into the past.

  “I knew a man,” he said. “He was not a general. He was not even in the army. But he was certainly mixed up in Khmer Rouge. He call himself Brother Tan, in the way communists like to name themselves, as if we are all equals. But some are more equal than others. Brother Tan often come to university in Phnom Penh where I do my doctoral research. He liked to cultivate followers among the impressionable.”

  “You think he was recruiting for the Khmer Rouge?”

  “I’m not sure what the plan was, or if there even was one. But no, it was not recruitment for the Khmer Rouge, not in the end.”

  “Not in the end?”

  “It was all done to foster disturbance. The students were manipulated into protesting against the government, creating civil unrest.”

  “Did you support the government?”

  Professor Ung took a long, slow breath. “Our history has taught us to be wary of voicing such opinion, Mr. Cox.”

  “I understand.”

  “But suffice to say, the government was a sham. It was a one-party state, corrupt to the core.”

  “So the student unrest might have been justified?”

  “One can view it from that posi
tion. But what they protest for was a communist state based on equality of resource. What they get was something else entirely.”

  “What did they get?”

  “They get murdered, Mr. Cox.”

  Lenny frowned and sat back in his chair. The professor, however, stood. “I need some tea. Will you join me?”

  Lenny nodded, and the professor escaped his barricade of books and led Lenny back out onto the street. Lenny watched the students moving around them. Their faces were young and animated, as if important ideas were being discussed, nothing less than the future of the world. He tried to imagine a similar scene in nearby Phnom Penh, similar conversations leading to much darker outcomes.

  They arrived at a small tearoom, simple wooden furniture where a handful of people sat drinking tea and chatting. Professor Ung took a seat at the rear of the dark space, and Lenny slipped in side-on, so he had his back to the wall and not the door. The professor ordered a pot of tea, and two china cups were placed on the table. The professor poured. There was no fan in the room and Lenny felt the heat rising from the teapot like a noose. The professor nodded to Lenny and sipped his tea. Lenny returned the nod but left his teacup on the table.

  “So what happened to them?” asked Lenny. “These students?”

  Professor Ung took his time with his tea and then gently returned the cup to its saucer. Then he breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, like some kind of meditative exercise.

  “The civil unrest and the anti-government sentiment reach a crescendo in April of 1975, such that when Khmer Rouge take the capital, they do so almost unopposed. The people are uncertain, and afraid of the unknown, but they are happy the fighting has stopped. The civil war is over and that is a good thing.”

  The professor sipped his tea again and placed the cup gently down.

  “Then Khmer Rouge clear the city. They order everyone out of Phnom Penh. They claim the government or the Americans or someone is going to bomb the city. They say it will only be for three days.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Pol Pot’s entire ideology rest on the notion of a rural agrarian-based economy. That if all the people toiled in the fields, we can grow enough food to feed the nation, and we will not need any help from outside.”