‘You kill to live.’
Elliot nodded. ‘Yeah, I suppose you could put it that way.’
‘Why?’
Why, indeed, he wondered. He remembered his pride in donning his first uniform, his determination to excel in training, his aspirations to leadership. And then, the grim reality of action. He closed his eyes and, as the red mist dispersed, saw again the bodies of women and children lying dead and dying in the fly-infested heat. ‘Governments train you,’ he said, ‘to defend your country, they tell you. A proud tradition, a heritage of freedom. War, they say, is about the nobility of one man sacrificing himself for the freedom of another. And so you go and kill people in the name of freedom and you believe you are right. And maybe sometimes you are. But when you find yourself a long way from home, in a strange land where the people see you not as a liberator but as a jailer, perhaps you begin to question who is right and who is wrong. And then all that matters is survival. You kill in order not to be killed. If you stop to think about it, you die. So you stop thinking. And then you just kill. After all, it’s what they trained you for.’
A shiver ran through him, a quick unaccountable chill in the heat of the night.
‘And when they have no further use for you, you find it hard to stop. It’s what you know, it’s what you do best. It has become a habit. So you sell yourself to whoever will buy. No proud tradition, no heritage of freedom.’ He paused. ‘No hypocrisy.’ He smiled without humour, a heavy irony in his chuckle. ‘For what we do we would once have been heroes. Now we are despised.’
‘Despised?’ Her brow crinkled in a frown of confusion.
‘Hated.’ He wondered how much she had really understood, wondered what it mattered how little she did.
‘And you no mind?’
He smiled at the absurdity of her question. ‘What’s to mind?’
‘If you choose be hated,’ she said solemnly, ‘then no one love you.’
Elliot’s smile faded. ‘That’s right, little girl,’ he said. ‘No one loves you.’
They sat in silence for a long, long time, and Elliot thought how comforting the night was, the dark wrapped around them a cloak of safety, all things hidden from the world. Ironic that they should be safe in the dark, the stuff of most men’s nightmares. It was with the light, he knew, that danger would come, perhaps death. He glanced at the child’s face beside him and felt awkward in the presence of such innocence, an innocence that could kill, incorruptible in its silent accusation. And yet, he knew, it was not her innocence that accused, but his guilt. ‘You should sleep,’ he advised.
Her eyes were unflickering as they gazed off into the blackness. ‘Every time I close eyes I see his face,’ she said. ‘He was so — surprise. Did he really think I love him? Did he think I choose to go with him all those time?’
And now Elliot realized why she had done it, and he too wondered at the cadre’s surprise. He was aware of the turn of her head, her eyes watching him for a long moment, almost as though she knew what had gone through his mind.
‘You see your friend when you close eyes?’ she said.
His face stung, as if she had slapped him. His mouth and throat were dry and he wished like hell he had another cigarette. ‘He was dying,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
‘Mistah McCue don’ think so.’
‘Mr McCue didn’t know.’ He turned to see confusion in her frown. ‘It wasn’t his wounds,’ he said. ‘You see...’ He searched for the words. ‘Mr Slattery came here to die. He had stomach cancer.’
‘Cancer?’ The word meant nothing to her.
‘A sickness,’ he said. ‘Something bad that grows inside you and kills you. Even if he had survived his wounds, the cancer would have killed him. He only had a few weeks left, maybe months.’
‘And you would have not kill him if he had not this — cancer?’
It was the question that had filled his own thoughts for the last two days. One he could never answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said simply, and stared hard at his hands clenched together on his knees in front of him. She reached out and placed her small hand gently over his. He tensed, her touch like an electric shock. And suddenly all tension seeped away, like a burden lifted. For the first time in as many years as he could remember, he had lifted a self-imposed embargo on himself. He had shared a part of himself with someone else. With the sharing came relief. But it also brought a feeling he had not known since childhood. Of vulnerability. And with that, fear.
He withdrew his hands from her touch and glanced down the length of the stricken craft. Serey still slept in the bottom of the boat and, at the far end, McCue dozed lightly, his mouth gaping a little. Moonlight reflected on the water seeping slowly but insistently through the boards of the hull. Elliot handed Ny a tin mug and lifted one himself. ‘Better start baling,’ he said. ‘We’re shipping more water.’
The dawn took them by surprise. The darkness lifted suddenly, receding west as the first rays of early morning yellow light fanned out from the watery horizon. McCue stood bleary-eyed scanning the endless expanse of Tonle Sap that surrounded them. He flashed a grim glance in Elliot’s direction and shook his head.
‘How’s our water?’ he asked.
‘About one more day.’ Elliot arched his eyebrows, creasing his forehead. ‘If we go easy.’
‘Is there any point?’ Serey glanced wearily from one to the other. ‘We are going to die out here anyway, are we not? And without food or water, it will be a very slow death.’
‘Not if my buddy here put a bullet through our heads. Then it could be quick and easy, just like it was for Mikey. That right, Elliot?’ McCue’s smile was a humourless grimace.
Elliot moved towards the stern. ‘I suggest we try and get this outboard working,’ he said as though McCue had not spoken. Ny watched him, concerned. Why didn’t he say something to defend himself? Why didn’t he tell the American the truth?
McCue moved to the back of the boat to join him, and the two men crouched over the motor to resume the hopeless task of stripping and reassembling. Ny turned to her mother. ‘We’re not going to die,’ she said in a high, almost hysterical voice. ‘We’re not!’ Serey sat unmoved, staring across the water, her face grey and gaunt. She gave no indication that she had even heard.
By mid-morning, after repeated failure to restart the outboard, McCue and Elliot gave up and collapsed into the bottom of the boat, running with sweat, gasping in the heat. Serey watched them expressionlessly from the shade of McCue’s makeshift awning. ‘Goddam!’ McCue shouted in sheer frustration. ‘Goddam this fucking country!’
‘Shhhh!’ Ny waved a hand to silence him. She had moved up to the stern when the two men had given up on the outboard, and was staring intently out across the lake.
Elliot pulled himself quickly on to his knees and followed her eye line. He could see nothing. ‘What is it?’
‘A sound,’ she said. ‘Listen.’
McCue sat up, too, and strained to hear. ‘I don’t hear nothing.’
But Elliot was still listening. ‘It’s an engine,’ he said, and his eyes raked back and forth across the horizon.
McCue focused all his attention on the apparent silence before he too picked up the distant growl of a motor. ‘Got it,’ he said.
‘There!’ Elliot pointed suddenly to the south-west. And out of the blur of blue, shimmering heat, a tiny dark speck seemed to grow on the horizon.
‘A boat,’ McCue whispered.
The power launch had once been the property of a wealthy Phnom Penh businessman who kept it moored at an exclusive marina outside the city, using it for weekend fishing trips and pleasure cruises on the Great Lake. It had been lavishly appointed with six berths and a small galley finished in rich mahogany and polished brass. Since 1975 it had been used to ferry important Khmer Rouge cadres and officials back and forth across the Mekong, between Phnom Penh and the Royal Palace, with occasional trips up the length of the Tonle Sap. As it powered its way north yet again, across the endless expanse of the largest body of inland water in Indochina, it had changed hands once more.