‘Stick close to me at all times,’ Elliot whispered to Ny. ‘Do everything I tell you, without question.’ If Ny heard, she gave no sign of it. He felt her trembling still, but she offered no resistance.
As they reached the trees, Elliot became aware of a shuffling sound that whispered in the darkness and seemed to fill the air. He turned. A hundred pairs of leathery feet padding in the dust. The whole commune was following behind. As Elliot stopped, they stopped too, their eyes upon him. He felt uncomfortable under their gaze, and a sense of shame made him angry. ‘For God’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you people understand? We can’t take you with us!’ They stared back in silence. Slattery, McCue and Serey stopped at the sound of his voice. Elliot turned to Serey. ‘You tell them,’ he said. ‘Together we are dead. If each goes his own way then at least some of us will survive.’
‘Why should I tell them what they already know?’ she replied simply. ‘You gave them their freedom, so they will follow you.’
Elliot’s eyes went cold. There was no time for this. Already there would be soldiers on their way to investigate the gunfire. He drew his pistol and levelled it at the crowd. ‘Then tell them that I will shoot anyone who follows us.’ And he raised his pistol a little and fired a single shot over their heads. There was an involuntary ducking, a shuffling of feet.
‘Hey, steady on, chief.’
Elliot ignored Slattery. ‘Tell them,’ he said again to Serey, single-minded, insistent.
She looked at him with contempt, then turned to the waiting eyes and spoke a few short sentences in a high, clear voice. And she, in turn, felt their contempt for her. She had betrayed them as surely as the Khmer Rouge had. She turned back to Elliot and spat in his face. ‘The Khmer Rouge shamed my daughter. Now you have shamed me.’
Elliot wiped the spittle from his face with his sleeve and glanced at Slattery and McCue. There was no sympathy in their eyes. ‘Fucking move!’ he barked. McCue took Serey gently by the arm and led her away at a trot after Slattery. Elliot holstered his pistol and found Ny staring at him. He hesitated a moment under her gaze then, ‘You, too,’ he growled, and pushed her ahead of him to hurry after the others. As he glanced back through the trees, he saw the dozens of dark figures still standing on the edge of the compound, and knew he had just sentenced them to an almost certain death.
They made slow progress through the forest. Serey and Ny were both weak, and the old woman had to stop and rest frequently, pale and breathless, a dry cough rattling in her throat. McCue gave them both water and a little food. He knew they would not be able to eat much. Stomachs shrunken by the paltry Khmer Rouge rations, conditioned to a daily intake of a few grains of rice, unable to cope with anything richer. It would be some time before they could eat a sustaining meal.
They had stopped to rest for five minutes, squatting in the cover of a dry river bed. Slattery had gone ahead to scout out the lie of the land. Serey looked at Elliot. ‘Why?’ she said. He frowned, not understanding. ‘Why would you risk your lives to save us?’
‘Your husband is paying us well.’
Her laugh was without humour, full of bitterness. ‘Does he think he can buy us, too?’ She looked at Ny. ‘Does he think he can buy back his daughter’s innocence?’ Ny lowered her head, unable to meet her mother’s eye. ‘What value does he put on our lives?’
‘He told me, everything he has,’ Elliot said.
She snorted her disgust. ‘Except his life and his freedom.’ She shook her head. ‘Time will mend a broken heart, but does he really believe he can pay for his soul?’
‘Frankly, Mrs Ang, I don’t know, and I really don’t care,’ Elliot said. ‘He’s paying me to do a job and I’m doing it.’
‘I have already told you,’ she said, ‘that I will not leave without my son.’
‘If he is in Phnom Penh then he is lost.’
‘No. He will wait for us there.’
Elliot sighed. ‘So you are going to go to Phnom Penh — on your own?’
‘If I have to.’
‘And how far do you think you would get?’
Her smile was serene with a fatalism that a Westerner would find hard to fathom. ‘Not far, perhaps, but I will die rather than leave him.’ She paused. ‘But you must take Ny with you.’
‘No!’ Ny turned on her mother, eyes burning, and spoke rapidly in her native tongue. Then she turned to Elliot. ‘I go with my mamma to Phnom Penh.’
Elliot looked at McCue, who shook his head. ‘What you gonna do, Elliot? Tie them up and carry them to Thailand?’
A rustle in the undergrowth brought both men sharply back to their present danger. Elliot swung his automatic round as Slattery crawled through the thick bank of ferns overhead to drop down to the river bed beside them. He was breathing hard and sweating. ‘Khmer Rouge,’ he whispered. ‘A dozen, maybe more. Coming this way.’
‘Move!’ Elliot hissed, and he pulled Ny roughly to her feet. ‘Which way?’ he asked Slattery.
Slattery nodded up ahead. ‘Better stick to the river bed.’
‘Okay, we’ll follow you.’
Slattery led them, through patches of dappled moonlight, at a half-run, half-crouch, east along the stony bed of the dry stream, ferns and creepers snagging on clothes and hands and faces. Serey stumbled and fell several times, and McCue half dragged, half carried her for several hundred metres before the strain on his arms began to take its toll. He slumped back against the bank, and damp, crumbling earth showered down over both of them. Beads of sweat left tracks in the dirt on his face. Elliot and Ny caught up and stopped. McCue caught the look on Elliot’s face. ‘Shit, man,’ he gasped. ‘Got to take a breather. The old lady ain’t got the legs for this, and I can’t carry her for ever.’ Elliot nodded and whistled softly into the darkness ahead. After a few moments, Slattery came back along the stream bed to join them.
‘What’s up, chief?’
‘We’re going to have to lie up for a while. Check our position.’
Slattery nodded and slipped over the north bank and melted silently away through the trees. Perhaps two kilometres to the west came the distant sound of automatic gunfire. Eight or ten bursts. And Elliot knew that the killing of those left behind had begun.
Slattery took a wide sweep through the trees, north then west, before crossing to the south side of the dry stream and turning east again to head back towards the others. There was no sign of the soldiers he had seen earlier. Perhaps they had headed west, back towards the commune in an attempt to cut them off. He heard sporadic fire from that direction and felt sick at the thought of those poor shambling creatures, unarmed and defenceless, being cut down as they made their hopeless breaks for freedom. They had not asked to be set free. They had not deserved to be enslaved. Perhaps death was now the only freedom they would ever know, their only possible escape.
Slattery’s few moments of lapsed concentration were fatal. He missed the shadows that slipped darkly through the trees away to his left. The snap of a twig crashed into his thoughts, through the haze of pain that came from the ache in his gut. But that split-second warning was not enough. He turned just in time to see the flash of an AK-47 and feel the pain of its burst of bullets as they tore through his left thigh and knee, shattering bones and arteries. The leg buckled under him and he fell face-first into the damp earth and humus. And he thought he smelled death in its bitter odour. The pain, at first, was crippling, and he found he could not move. He heard footsteps approach cautiously through the undergrowth. He cursed his careless stupidity, his lack of professionalism. His cancer seemed such a small thing now, and he thought, in that moment, that he loved life more dearly than he had ever done before.