He had only the haziest recollection of the Americans who had once moved freely about the streets of Phnom Penh, and regretted that he had not been old enough to learn to speak their language. What little French he had known was gone for ever. He had felt jealous of his mother and sister, how they could speak to these men. He knew they had saved their lives, and he had been puzzled by his mother’s hostility towards them. Surely they were to be admired: tough, strong, seemingly invincible, like the soldiers in the American movies he had seen before his life had been torn up by the roots. He felt both proud and safe in their company, and he enjoyed the respect with which they treated him. They had saved his family from the Khmer Rouge. It was his duty to save them from the Vietnamese.
It took them nearly an hour, skirting the campfires around the fringes of the city centre, to reach the highway that would take them south-west towards the deep-water port of Kompong Som. They lay in wait for more than fifteen minutes watching a convoy of trucks heading out along the highway, before an unnatural silence fell upon the west of the city. The sky had clouded over, virtually obliterating the moon. You could very nearly touch the darkness. They crouched, huddled together, behind the wall of a derelict factory, creeper growing up all around them where it had broken through the cracked pavings. The only sounds the creaking of the cicadas and the whine of mosquitoes.
Hau could feel the heat from the bodies of the two men, could smell their sweat, see it glistening on their faces. He wished he was going with them, that he did not have to go back. After all, what was there to go back to? But he had a sense of duty, too, towards his mother and sister. He was the man. It was up to him to look after them. He felt the hand of the American slip into his and grasp it firmly. ‘Thanks, kid.’ And for some unaccountable reason Hau felt tears well in his eyes and he was glad it was dark. His sense of safety was slipping away, and he felt less like the man and soldier he wanted to be, and more like the small boy he was.
The taller of the two soldiers, the one his mother had called English — a concept of which Hau had no grasp — pressed something small and hard into his hand. He looked down to see the tiny figure of St Christopher, bowed by the load on its back, and looked up quickly to find the Englishman’s eyes hidden in shadow. He clutched it tightly in his hand and felt strangely moved. The big man ruffled his hair and both men moved out from the cover of the wall and off into the night, silent shadows quickly swallowed by the dark.
A voice called out somewhere away to the right, a high-pitched voice, nasal and shrill. An engine roared loudly in the dark, and lights flooded the road beyond the wall. Hau pressed his back against the brick, and heard the clatter of hard soles on tarmac. Almost immediately the night erupted in a blaze of fire and noise. Giants in silhouette flickered across the factory’s flaking wall, crouched and running. The whine of mosquitoes was replaced by the whine of bullets pinging off concrete surfaces. To Hau, pressed in sudden terror against the brick, the shadows on the factory wall seemed to grow massively in size, huge dark spirits advancing through the night towards him. He watched, transfixed in horror, as their definition melted at the last, diverging and vanishing. The footsteps ran clattering off to the left and right. The harsh rattle of automatic fire fibrillated in the still night air: five, six, seven bursts that seemed to come from all around, echoing back off the factory wall. Above the roar Hau thought he heard the grunt of a human voice, the thud of a body on tarmac.
Then the shooting stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, the chatter of guns replaced by a chatter of frightened, excited voices, before silence returned. The only sound was the erratic splutter of an idling engine.
Hau felt his heart beating in his throat, heard the roar of blood in his ears. His knuckles burned white as he clutched his Kalashnikov in fear. He took a deep breath and ran silently along the length of the wall, bent double, stopping just short of a breach in the brickwork. His breath came in short trembling bursts, and for a moment he could not move. He relaxed his grip on the AK-47 and realized that he was still clutching the St Christopher, its fine silver chain dangling from between his fingers. Carefully he laid his weapon on the ground and slipped the chain around his neck. The bowed figure seemed to burn against his chest. Creeping forward, then, on his knees, he peered cautiously through the shattered brickwork.
The road lay bathed in the sulphurous light of a jeep’s headlamps. Beyond their haloes of brightness, dark figures moved stealthily among the shadows of the darker buildings rising behind. Far away, to his right, Hau saw another figure crouched behind the skeleton of a rusted saloon car that lay at an odd angle, half on the road, half on the pavement, caught in the full glare of the headlamps. The figure was tense and motionless, and Hau realized that the other figures moving beyond the lights were slowly but surely encircling it.
Closer, sprawled awkwardly across the camber of the road, a man lay face-down in the gutter, a pool of blood spreading through the dusty, broken surface. His automatic rifle lay near the faded centre line, casting a long shadow across the ground, reaching out towards his lifeless hand.
With a shock like a fist in the gut, Hau recognized the Englishman. His hand rose instinctively to the medallion that hung around his neck, and he was overwhelmed by guilt. But it was anger that fuelled his sudden, foolish bravery as he snatched the Kalashnikov, stepping out from the cover of the wall and swinging it wildly in the direction of the jeep across the street. Bullets spat from its muzzle in quick succession, hot metal burning his hands, smoke and the acrid stink of cordite flashing up into his face. The front grille of the jeep seemed to dissolve under the sustained burst of fire, bullets ploughing through glass and engine cowling and rubber. Shattered headlamps extinguished the glare, and dark fell across the street like blindness.
Hau was only vaguely aware of the chatter of McCue’s M16, away to his right, and the startled shouts of the Vietnamese. He stumbled through the dark, almost tripping over the prostrate figure of Elliot. Don’t be dead, he whispered to himself again and again. But Elliot’s body seemed lifeless and leaden as he tried to turn it over. Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead! A hand pulled him roughly aside and, briefly, he felt McCue’s sour, rasping breath on his face. Automatic fire seemed to rattle all around them, punctuated by shrill Vietnamese voices and the sound of running feet. A radio crackled somewhere nearby. But in the darkness there was confusion, and in confusion, safety.
McCue grunted as he strained to lift the dead weight of Elliot on to his shoulder. Hau saw the faintest grim outline of his face, and as the American made for the hole in the wall, Hau scampered across the road to retrieve Elliot’s M16. A burst of fire whispered past his face, bullets splintering the brick behind him. Something sharp caught his forehead, just above the right brow, slicing like a razor across the bone. He hardly felt it, but was blinded almost immediately by the blood that ran into his eye. He slung the Kalashnikov across his shoulder and raised the M16, emptying its magazine in wide sweeping arcs of fire across the street. He heard a man scream above the roar of the weapon, before the mechanism jammed on an empty chamber, and he turned and sprinted for the wall, throwing himself through the gap after McCue. Behind him, AK-47s chattered in the dark, but carried no threat now as he ran breathless down the narrow canyons, between towering derelict buildings.