'Symes,' he said. Pringle had flown him in from Bangkok, said he was first class.
We hadn't made contact before so we exchanged code introductions and he got it wrong the first time and I had to insist before I was sure of security, I wasn't worried, it sometimes happens, you just have to check it out. Then I got him aboard the van.
'Did you signal the DIF?' I asked him.
'Yes, from the airline office.' Trans-Kampuchean Air Services.
'Where's Slavsky now?'
'Over there. The three jeeps and the staff car. He's in the car.'
A motorcade, looked important. Breakthrough?
We were standing off the target by a hundred yards so I got my 10 x 50s and focused, still couldn't see anything more of Slavsky but a pale blurred face behind the window.
'Where's your vehicle?' I asked Symes.
'By the gate.'
Battered jeep, and I noted the number plate. 'Stand off somewhere on the perimeter road,' I told him, 'and take up station when we move. If I lose the staff car, stay with it and contact the DIF when you can, give him the score. I'll pick it up from him as soon as I can find a phone.'
'Roger.' He slipped out of the van, moved at a loping walk to the nearest cover, the chain-link fence, shoulders hunched as you often see in surveillance people, the unconscious physical expression of their conscious need to hide.
I began watching the sky.
The noon heat was down, spreading a mirage across the airfield and leaving the line of sugar palms beyond the perimeter track standing in water.
We should keep it in mind that if in fact General Kheng intends to launch a missile attack on the capital on the nineteenth, we have only until midnight to stop him.
Did he think we didn't know that, for God's sake?
Chopper.
Did he think we couldn't count, read a calendar, know how to synchronize watches, manage our buttons, see the bloody obvious when it was staring us in the face?
Chopper, coming in low from the south, a Kamov KA-26, twin rotors, the same type, possibly the same machine, that had brought Colonel Choen here from Phnom Penh.
This was at noon plus twenty-six and I began noting the time because Salamander was obviously shifting into a new phase and it could be important for Pringle to know how things were developing, to know the time of the arrival and departure of vehicles and their travel patterns simply as a matter of keeping a moving target in the sights. This didn't mean he might not have to sit at his base for hours on end without a shred of information coming in from the field as the day drew out: it would depend on how and when we could find a telephone without breaking cover.
The Kamov was drifting in across the sugar palms towards the freight area, turning a few degrees before it touched down and blew the mirage beyond it into swirling mists.
I fine-tuned the focus again.
Two men got out of the staff car: Slavsky and a Cambodian in battledress with a Western-style army beret, officer rank. Five, six men climbed down from the helicopter, one of them leading the others across the tarmac. Salutes were exchanged, and as Slavsky came forward to shake hands I recognized the leader of the visiting group. I hadn't seen him before but he was the Khmer Rouge officer in the photographs I'd seen at the villa in Phnom Penh, standing close to Pol Pot in every shot, a younger man in jungle battledress with epaulettes and a peaked cap, one picture with his name below it: General Kheng.
16:12.
I'd started thinking by the twenty-four hour clock at this stage because signals were being exchanged and Pringle would be keeping an official record as they came in: I'd phoned him from an American drugstore opposite the Hotel du Lac soon after Slavsky and General Kheng had arrived there from the airfield.
Thirty minutes later they'd come out of the hotel together, shaking hands before Slavsky had got into his rental Chevrolet and turned south, possibly back to the airfield: I wasn't curious. Kheng was now the target and he'd climbed into the staff car, moving off with one of the camouflaged jeeps ahead of him and one behind.
He was still inside the white two-storey building next to the temple where I'd kept watch before, waiting for Colonel Choen. The general had been there for more than three hours now. There was no sign above the bullet-scarred doors but the building was obviously the local headquarters of the Khmer Rouge: since I'd been here I'd seen half a dozen jeeps arriving and leaving again, some carrying an officer with an escort, some with only a driver.
It was 17:23, with the late sun lowering across the skyline, when I decided it was time to take action. Flockhart had wanted to know the whereabouts of General Kheng and he now had that information, but it was beginning to look as if Kheng might have come here to stay the night at headquarters, bringing the deadline down to zero. If there were a conceivable chance of jumping ahead of him I wanted to take it, get information for Control, this time as to where Kheng would go next — back to the capital, out to the camp in the foothills here or to the main Khmer Rouge base in the jungle. Whatever Flockhart had in his mind, this information could now be critical, conclusive, as time ran out.
I flashed my parking lights twice, and waited.
Symes came up from behind the van and put his face in the window.
'Look,' I said, 'there's something else I've got to do, so if I leave here at any time don't worry, just stay with the target wherever he goes. He was the leader of the group who got out of the chopper and his name is General Kheng. Signal the DIF as soon as you possibly can at every stage if he starts moving. Questions?'
'If he gets on a plane?'
'Find out where it's going and signal the DIF from the Air Services office.'
'Roger.'
He went back to his jeep.
It was an hour before I could make a move.
In the mirror I saw a Chinese jeep leaving the KR headquarters with an officer at the wheel, unescorted, and as it passed the end of the street I started up and took two rights and a left and saw the jeep bouncing over the potholes fifty yards ahead and took up the tail. It was following the same route as Colonel Choen had taken, but I needed to talk to this officer long before we reached the camp.
There were fewer buildings now, a few huts, then a wasteland of scrub and after a few miles a huddle of broken concrete slabs that might have been buildings once, before the revolution, their walls scarred with shrapnel and dead palm trees leaning across them. One of the buildings still stood, fissured and windowless, and I thought it looked suitable, well out of earshot from the nearest habitation and some way from the road.
The Chinese jeep was half a mile in front and it took two miles to catch up and overtake, and as I went past it I used the horn and held my hand up, asking the driver to stop, cutting in a little to reinforce the message as I hit the brakes and ran the van into the scrub and switched off the engine.
Then I left it there and trotted back to the jeep. The KR was sitting at the wheel with his right hand on the butt of his revolver so I relaxed him a little by introducing myself.
'Je suis un collegue de Slavsky!'
'Eh bien?'
I didn't say any more because I was close enough now and used a half-fist to his carotid artery to cut off the blood to the brain for a few seconds and then caught him as he keeled over, taking him round to the passenger seat and propping him there and slipping the gun out of its holster and pushing it into my belt. He was waking up a little now and I worked on the thyroid cartilage, enough to make him fight for breath, and while he was doing that I took the jeep in a U-turn and gunned up.
He was fluent in French then, hadn't asked me to repeat what I'd said; this I would have expected in a man of his rank: he wore captain's insignia.