Rath grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You always did go for older women.’
But Nim was still tense. ‘What have you got in there?’ he called to the women.
‘We need help.’ Ny’s voice was quivering. ‘We are sinking.’
‘We have no room,’ Nim said.
Rath turned to him. ‘Of course we have. We’ve no use for the old one. But the girl... When was the last time you had a woman, Uncle Nim?’
Sien jumped down from the roof to join them and leered over the rail. ‘She’s a pretty little thing, that one. I’ll get her.’ He swung a leg over the rail, but Nim grabbed his arm.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t like this. What are they doing here — two women on their own?’
‘Runaways, like Sien said.’ Rath glanced back at the girl and felt the stirrings of lust between his legs.
‘You’ve just forgotten what it’s like, old man,’ Sien snarled, pulling free of Nim’s grasp. ‘Me and Rath, we’re younger, we’ve got needs.’
‘The only thing we need is to survive,’ Nim snapped. ‘There’s something not right about this. Where did they get these?’ He pointed to the canvas packs under the awning.
‘Who knows, who cares?’ Rath sneered. ‘How can an old woman and a young girl be a danger to us?’
‘I’ll check it out,’ Sien said, and he skipped over the railing before Nim could stop him, and clambered down into the boat. Ny’s grip tightened around the butt of Elliot’s revolver hidden below her tunic.
On the far side of the launch, Elliot and McCue slipped quietly out of the water and pulled themselves noiselessly aboard. Elliot pointed to the machine gun on the cabin roof. McCue nodded and climbed, catlike, up the side of the cabin, hidden from the view of the three Khmers whose attention was still focused on Serey and Ny. Elliot drew a long hunting blade from his belt and crouching low, inched his way around the forward side of the cabin, bare feet leaving soft wet footprints in his wake.
Sien grinned lecherously at Ny. He pulled one of the canvas packs out from the awning and, squatting in the bottom of the boat, started rifling through its contents. He arched his eyebrows in surprise. Maps, a shortwave radio, various foreign provisions. He looked up at the two women and frowned in suspicion.
‘Where’d you get this?’
‘What is it?’ Nim called.
But Sien paid no attention. Instead he drew a knife from his belt and moved towards Ny. ‘I asked you a question!’ he hissed.
Ny stiffened with fear, and almost involuntarily started to draw the revolver. But her clumsy movement alerted Sien and he grabbed her wrist, twisting it backwards so that the revolver swung up and then fell harmlessly from her grasp. ‘Well, well,’ he said grinning, ‘a dangerous little thing, aren’t you?’ And he glanced at the revolver, his expression hardening. ‘Now where would you get something like that?’ His body partially masked the view from the launch, and Nim leaned nervously over the rail.
‘What’s going on?’
Sien barely registered the movement beside him, turning instinctively to find himself staring into the barrel of McCue’s revolver clutched between Serey’s trembling hands. For a moment he tensed, then relaxed and stretched his lips across yellowing teeth in a humourless grimace as Serey jerked the trigger. The explosion was deafening in the confined space, and Serey and Ny felt a singeing flash of heat. Warm blood spattered across their faces as the bullet punched a hole through Sien’s face, hurling him backwards into the bottom of the boat.
There was a second of startling confusion in Rath’s mind before he swung his AK-47 towards the women in the boat below. But his finger never reached the trigger. A burst of fire sprayed half a dozen bullets into his lower back, cutting him almost in two and launching him over the rail to sprawl across the corpse of his cousin below.
Nim threw himself backwards, instinctively, against the wall of the cabin and out of the line of fire from above. Fear and confusion tumbled together through his mind in a moment of blind panic. There were weapons below. He turned towards the hatch and literally ran on to Elliot’s blade, gasping in pain and surprise as the cold steel ruptured his spleen and slid upwards through his stomach towards his heart. Elliot’s cold blue eyes met his, and he knew in that moment that he would never see his home again.
Elliot withdrew his knife and let the dead weight of the lifeless Khmer drop to the deck, a pool of dark red spreading quickly across the boards. He crossed to the rail and looked down into the boat below. The bodies of the two younger men lay in a grotesque embrace. Ny clutched her mother’s head to her breast, the older woman sobbing uncontrollably, McCue’s revolver lying at her feet where she had dropped it.
‘Elliot!’ There was an urgency in McCue’s voice.
Elliot turned to find McCue standing with the machine gun trained on his chest. His face was tight and pale. The two men stared at each other for a long moment.
‘Get the women on board,’ Elliot said. ‘I’ll check out the rest of the boat.’ And he moved towards the hatch, and swung himself down the steps below deck and out of sight. McCue remained motionless for a few seconds longer, still rigid with unresolved tension, before pushing the machine gun aside and jumping down from the roof.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In the deserted streets the clatter of the bicycle, flat tyres shredding rubber on cracked tarmac, echoed back from the long abandoned blocks of flats. Its rider, in tattered black trousers and ragged tunic, seemed unaware of the devastation around him. Metal security grilles, once drawn across shop doorways, hung smashed and rusting from broken hinges. The carcasses of cars and motorbikes and cyclo-pousses littered the streets and pavements like the rotting corpses of wild game killed for sport. In the heat and glare of midday, the shattered remains of Phnom Penh were silent and unmoving, like death itself. Only the distant and occasional rumble of heavy artillery stirred the silence, unheard or disregarded by the cyclist. The rider turned left, along a broad boulevard lined on either side by palm trees. Banknotes fluttered briefly along the gutter in the breeze of his passing. A torn teddy hung from the handlebars, spinning slowly, eyes as sightless as the boy’s.
Hau’s AK-47 was slung across his back. His hands and face were sticky with the juices of the fruit on which he had earlier gorged himself — wild tropical fruits growing in profusion in the overgrown gardens of the villas near his home. He felt again the fierce cramps in his lower stomach, signalling yet another emptying of his aching bowels, and he began to sing to take his mind off the pain. A tuneless rendering of the Khmer Rouge national anthem. He did not think about the words he sang. They were a reflex action, almost instinctive, dinned into his impressionable young mind at countless compulsory national culture meetings at the commune.
Bright red blood which covers our fields and plains,
Of Kampuchea, our motherland!
Sublime blood of workers and peasants,
Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!
The Blood changing into unrelenting hatred
And resolute struggle,
On April 17th, under the flag of the Revolution,
Free from Slavery!
The dark shadow of a vulture swooping overhead flashed across the road ahead of him. Its claws rattled on a corrugated iron roof as it landed on a building opposite, its beady black eyes watching with intense interest the figure on the bicycle below. But Hau didn’t notice it. His singing faltered as the cramps in his belly increased in intensity. He pulled up and climbed stiffly off the bike, letting it fall to the road in his haste to wrench down his trousers and squat in the gutter. A stream of foul brown liquid squirted from under him to splash into the dust. After a few moments the cramps subsided and he pulled his trousers up and picked up his bike. He felt weak, a little giddy, his mouth parched and dry, a hungry knot in his stomach. He remounted the bike and pushed off, the strain of regaining momentum taking its toll on the wasting muscles of his legs. For a while he tried to remember the song he had been singing, but it seemed strangely elusive, and he soon gave up to let his mind wander as aimlessly as his bike.