‘Jeez,’ Slattery said. ‘It’s so quiet it’s eerie.’ He looked towards the civilian huts, but there was no sound, no sign of movement. ‘Where is everybody?’
A tall figure walked towards them, through the settling dust, from the other side of the compound. Elliot looked grim. He dropped their backpacks at their feet and glanced round.
‘Sure we got the right place, chief?’
Serey had awoken from a shallow sleep with the first explosions of the hand grenades, and wondered if she had been dreaming. Then bursts of automatic fire had sent chills of fear through her. All the women in the hut were awake now, sitting up and staring with frightened eyes in the dark. She had felt Ny move at her side.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Then two huge explosions had rocked the whole commune. Their hut had shaken on its stilts. Ny held tight to her mother’s arm. Still no one in the hut moved, and a deep silence followed. Then the sound of voices from somewhere across the compound. Men’s voices. Strange voices, speaking in a strange tongue. There was a further silence, then a loud call. ‘Ang Serey.’ Ny’s fingers tightened around her arm and she thought it was the voice of death calling her. ‘Ang Ny,’ the voice called this time, and Ny’s eyes opened wide with fear. Mother and daughter clung to each other, too afraid to move.
‘Serey, Ny.’ The voice was insistent. ‘We have come to take you away. Come out.’
Confusion penetrated the fear. Serey frowned. Now she recognized the words. The man was calling in English. A language she had not heard for four years, a language whose words she had never dared utter for fear of betraying a background that would have meant certain death.
‘It’s a trick, Mother,’ Ny whispered. ‘It must be a trick.’
A murmur ran among the other women in the hut, their eyes all on Serey and Ny. ‘Go,’ one of them said, ‘or they will kill us all.’ But still mother and daughter could not move.
‘Serey, your husband Yuon sent us.’ The voice again. And Serey knew for certain it must be a trick.
‘Go! In the name of Buddha, go!’ the woman hissed. The hands of other women pushed them towards the door.
Ny took her mother’s hand. ‘We have no choice.’ They rose up and the others shrank away. Serey thought, if I am to die, I will die with dignity. But her heart wept for Ny.
The men in the compound looked from hut to hut, searching for a response. Then the shrunken figures of Serey and Ny appeared at the door of one of them, and started down the ladder. When they reached the bottom they stood and looked at the three soldiers in amazement.
‘Jesus,’ Slattery said. ‘They’re little more than skeletons.’
Elliot turned to McCue and pulled the chequered scarf away from his neck. ‘Get rid of those.’
McCue obliged, slipping quickly out of the black pyjamas to reveal his jungle camouflage. Elliot walked over to the two women and was stunned by the appearance of the mother. Fleshless yellow skin stretched tightly across every bone, arms and legs flawed by open sores, grey hair thin and matted. A shrunken wreck of a human being. He was reminded of the photographs he had seen of pitiful souls in Belsen and Auschwitz. The girl looked fitter, stronger, a lustre in her hair. Perhaps youth had provided her with a resilience that her mother had lacked. And, yet, while Serey’s eyes seemed dead, Ny’s burned brightly with something he could not put a name to.
He spoke softly to Serey.
‘My name is Elliot. I’ve been paid by Yuon to bring you out of Cambodia.’ He paused. ‘Do you understand me?’ She nodded, but the eyes were still dead. He looked at Ny. ‘And your daughter?’
Ny said, ‘I understand.’
Elliot was relieved. A language barrier would have made things difficult. ‘We must leave this place quickly. Our guns will have been heard for many kilometres. There will be soldiers here very soon.’
He took Serey gently by the arm and led them across the compound to where McCue and Slattery stood watching. Both were kitted up, ready to go. They too were shocked by Serey’s appearance.
‘Do you know where your son is?’ Elliot asked her, and the first flicker of life appeared in her eyes.
‘He is in Phnom Penh,’ she said.
Elliot cursed inwardly. ‘Then we can do nothing for him.’
There was no emotion in her voice as she said, ‘I will not leave Cambodia without him.’
Slattery nudged Elliot and nodded towards the huts. In the moonlight, men and women, young and old, were descending ladders, pathetic figures in ragged black pyjamas. Big dark eyes staring from shrunken heads, bones and joints stretching skin like crepe, blemished by sores and shrivelled by the sun. A hundred, perhaps more, pairs of feet shuffled through the dust of the compound towards them. Slattery felt the sting of tears in his eyes. These creatures were scarcely recognizable as human. ‘What the hell have they been doing to people in this country?’ His voice was barely a whisper.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Elliot said.
‘I will not leave Cambodia without my son,’ Serey said again.
Elliot strapped on his backpack. ‘We’ll discuss that when we’re safe.’
‘What about them?’ Slattery nodded towards the eyes that watched them with a dull curiosity and the faint light of hope.
‘Well, we can’t take them with us, can we?’ Elliot snapped. ‘They’re going to have to take their chances on their own.’
‘What chances?’ Slattery looked at him. ‘They have no chance, Jack.’
McCue suddenly broke ranks and sprinted across the compound. A figure darted through the shadows of the huts, running for his life. McCue caught him before he reached the trees and brought him crashing to the ground. He pulled him, struggling in an armlock, back across the compound. He was a young man, full-faced and well-fed. He wore the black pyjamas and red-chequered kramar of the Khmer Rouge. His eyes were black with fear.
Ny’s heart skipped a beat as she recognized the young cadre who had come for her every night all these months. ‘What do you want me to do with him?’ McCue asked Elliot.
‘Kill the bastard!’ Slattery said and drew out his pistol.
‘No!’ Ny stepped forward and stopped him. The young man’s knees almost buckled with relief. She was going to save him. Ny smiled a strange smile and drew Elliot’s knife from its sheath. A look of disbelief flashed across the face of the cadre as she drove it deep into his belly and, with both hands, pulled it up high under his rib cage. The scream choked in his throat as blood bubbled into his mouth, and he fell dead in the dust. Ny stood, pale and trembling, and the bloody knife fell from her hands. There was not a sound as the tears welled up and spilled from her mother’s eyes.
And, then, one by one, the ragged creatures that had once been men and women stepped forward to spit on the body of the cadre until it ran with saliva that glowed almost luminescent in the moonlight, like the ghost of all their suffering. Elliot picked up his knife, cleaned and sheathed it. He had seen many men die, but rarely had he felt such a sense of shock. Not for the man who had died, but for this young girl, still little more than a child, whose hatred had robbed her of her innocence, corrupting her in a single act of cold-blooded killing. He thought, she could have been my daughter.
‘Elliot.’ He turned. McCue’s face was very pale. ‘We’re running out of time.’
Elliot nodded. ‘Look after the old woman. I’ll take the girl. Slattery, get us out of here.’
Serey glanced back over her shoulder as McCue led her away across the compound after Slattery. How many times she had dreamed of freedom, of escape. But now, with the eyes upon her of all those who had shared her misery and pain, she felt empty and sad, cheated of her moment. She wondered if any of them could ever escape from the memory. She saw the man called Elliot take Ny by the arm and lead her after them. And she turned away quickly. She had done everything she could to protect her, but it had never been enough, and now she was lost.