‘What are you doing!’ Prince Sihanouk demanded.
‘Deserter!’ spat the driver, and swung himself out of the car. He drew his pistol, steadied it at arm’s length on the roof, and levelled it at the back of the running boy.
‘Leave it!’ snapped one of the Chinese. ‘There is no time!’
The driver cursed. The boy was out of range anyway. He holstered his pistol and jumped back into the driver’s seat, his lips curled in annoyance.
‘Go,’ said the Chinese. ‘We are already late.’
As the car screeched away with spinning tyres, Sihanouk saw the naked boy turn safely out of view to be swallowed up by the doomed city. It was to be the Prince’s last sight, he knew, of his beloved Phnom Penh. And it filled him with a deep despair.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Serey and Ny squatted on facing bunks by the light of a small oil lamp, gorging on large bowls of steaming rice. Outside, the rumble of thunder sounded ominously in the black night sky, and warm rain battered on the deck above. Ny glanced nervously at her mother. They had not spoken in the hours since the shooting on the boat. The initial tears had dried up. The warmth of their embrace, as Serey clung to her daughter in the moments after the shooting, had turned cold, and that brief vulnerability had dissipated, leaving her brittle and aloof. Ny’s burden of guilt seemed greater now than ever.
She looked at the frail, shrunken figure in peasant pyjamas and longed simply to hold her. Through all the silent years, when family loyalties and affections had been dangerous, banished by the higher demands of Angkar, they had grown apart. Confidences had become almost as rare as conversation. Increasingly, all that had tied them was the umbilical cord of the past, memories, how they had once been. Mother and daughter. They were like strangers now, embarrassed by the knowledge of what each had done, what each had become. They had no secrets. Whatever Hau had done or become, only he knew. And he knew nothing of their shame. Perhaps Hau would be their only salvation. I have done things. They made me do things, he had told her that night beneath the hut at the commune. She hadn’t wanted to know then, didn’t now. She wanted never to know. She remembered his small, boyish face with its old eyes, and the tears that had run down his cheeks as he left. I will go to our home in Phnom Penh. If our country is freed tell my mother to look for me there.
‘Do you think Hau will be in Phnom Penh?’ she asked suddenly.
Her mother’s sad eyes flickered slowly up to meet hers. ‘There is no point in asking questions that cannot be answered.’
It was like a slap in the face, and the old woman turned back to the last of her rice, unaware of the tears that filled her daughter’s eyes, blinking hard to hide her own.
Directly above them, in the cabin, Elliot was slumped in a fixed swivel seat by the wheel watching the rain run down the windows. His cigarette glowed in the dark as he sucked deeply at the hot burning tobacco. Along with the sacks of rice in the galley, they had found other provisions: tinned foods, cartons of cigarettes, a crate of beer. They had eaten their fill, then taken a course south across the deserted wastes of the Great Lake. As the sun set, they had reached the southern end of the lake and navigated slowly through numerous waterways before debouching into the wide, chocolate-brown waters of the slow-moving Mekong. These had been tense moments, exposed as they were to attack from either bank. But they had seen nothing, no sign of human activity or habitation. An eerie calm blanketed the land, unnatural in its stillness.
‘Where is everyone — anyone?’ McCue had muttered under his breath. He was unsettled by the pall of silence, broken only by the gentle put-put of their engine, that hung over them.
With the ending of the day, the heat and humidity had intensified, great dark clouds rolling in from the west to blot out the sky before night fell to cloak them in darkness. Elliot reckoned they were less than an hour upriver from Phnom Penh itself, and they had decided to drop anchor in the lee of the west bank and wait until just before dawn to make their final approach to the city. The rain had started not long after.
Elliot took a slug of beer and checked his watch. Almost half-past ten. It would be a long night, through which the fear of tomorrow would deny him sleep. He was annoyed by the fear that knotted in his stomach and held all the muscles of his body hard and tense. It was unaccountable. Less than eight hours earlier he had accepted, without fear, that death was inevitable. And now, the hope that glimmered feebly in the promised light of dawn had made him fear again. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t death he was afraid of, but life.
The sound of bare feet slithered across the roof and McCue dropped lightly down in the open doorway. Elliot could see his dark form faintly silhouetted against the sky beyond. The American stepped in out of the rain, dripping on to the dry boards. ‘No point in keeping watch. We can’t see and we can’t be seen in this rain.’ He spoke quietly, but his voice seemed very close.
‘Sure,’ Elliot said.
‘D’you get anything on the radio?’
‘Voice of America, Radio Moscow, World Service.’
‘And?’
‘The Brits and the Yanks say the situation is confused. Moscow says the Khmer Rouge have abandoned the city and are fleeing north. The Vietnamese are expected to take Phnom Penh tomorrow.’
McCue shifted uneasily in the dark. ‘What do you think?’
Elliot took another draw on his cigarette. ‘I think things are bound to look confusing from a Bangkok massage parlour, which is where most of the American and British correspondents will be right now. The Russians’ll be getting their briefing from the front line.’
‘You still plan to go in before dawn?’
‘Have you got a better idea?’ The tension between them crackled like electricity in the dark.
‘You know the kid won’t be there.’
‘Sure.’
‘So what then?’
Elliot sighed and brushed the sweat from his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’ He sounded weary. ‘The woman and the girl shouldn’t have anything to fear from the Vietnamese.’
‘You ain’t suggesting we give ourselves up?’
Elliot raised a bottle to his lips and let warm flat beer run back over his throat. ‘Can’t say I particularly fancy an extended stay at the Hanoi Hilton.’
The Hanoi Hilton was the name given to the re-education centres in Hanoi where hundreds of American servicemen captured during the Vietnam war had been imprisoned and tortured, brainwashed into making public denouncements of their country’s involvement in the war. Many had eventually been released, but it was rumoured that many more still languished there.
‘So what are you suggesting?’ McCue’s voice was cold.
‘Seems to me,’ Elliot said, pulling the last lungful of smoke from his cigarette, ‘that our best hope is to reach the coast, try and get across the Gulf of Thailand.’
‘Shit, man! How are we gonna do that with an old lady and a young girl in tow?’
Elliot shook his head. ‘We can’t.’
There was a long silence. When at last he spoke, McCue’s voice was brittle and flinty. ‘You’re saying we dump them.’
‘Even if we could take them with us, they wouldn’t go. Not without the boy.’ Elliot’s voice was calm and even. There was no hint of defensiveness in it. He was simply stating the facts as he saw them. He wasn’t prepared for McCue’s lunge across the cabin, the hands that grabbed him in the dark. Hot breath hissed in his face.
‘You bastard, Elliot! If you were ready to dump them, what the fuck are we doing here? What did Mikey die for?’
For the first time in many hours all Elliot’s tension fell away. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t.’ And somehow the words relieved him of the burden. ‘Things just didn’t work out the way I planned.’