With one hand I tore the cap off a bottle of water and took swigs at it and then washed the dried spittle off my face, flicking my eyes across the three mirrors in turn as the track straightened and ran between boulders for half a mile and then began twisting and rising, the bottle of water empty now and the mirrors still dark, the waxing moon afloat in the southern sky and the rim of the mountains lying in waves below it, touched here and there by its reflection on flat rock.

  The jeep lost traction sometimes over the loose shale, skating at an angle and coming back as I shifted gears to get control; there were something like fifteen degrees of play in the steering box and it was tricky to keep this brute from Beijing on course. I was using third gear now, because –

  Lights.

  In the left-hand mirror, fanning between the hills behind and below me, flashing once as they came directly in line and then fading, blacked-out suddenly by a turn in the track. They would belong to a vehicle leaving the camp: all traffic on this route was strictly Khmer Rouge.

  The major road to Pouthisat was still some way ahead, two miles, two and a half, and there wasn’t a single chance of driving out of this. Their lights were in the right-hand mirror now, flashing again as they lined up, brighter this time. The crew on board had already found my jeep standing there and this one gone; they might have stopped long enough to take a look around and seen the two soldiers lying there among the rocks. They would therefore be driving flat out and with purpose, and even if I got to the major road before they did I’d be within range of their guns, finito.

  The terrain was steeper here, with rifts and gullies filled with shadow in the peripheral glow of my lights, and I began watching for somewhere to ditch.

  There might of course be nowhere - I might simply have to stop this thing and get out and walk, run, while there was time. Question: how long would it take those people behind me to raise the alarm and bring a search party of a hundred men here in packed transports, two hundred, five?

  The jeep was skating again and I shifted down and got traction. Light came suddenly and in all three mirrors this time as the track ran straight for a while. They’d closed the distance by half, by more than half: their lights were throwing shadows now from the rear window of the jeep.

  Then I saw the gully leading away from the track, deeper than a gully, a small ravine, and steep, and I waited until the lights behind me were blacked-out by the rocks and then wrenched the jeep into a spin with the power still on and sent it towards the slope, dousing the headlights and hitting the brakes and jumping clear with enough momentum left in the thing to take it to the bottom of the ravine.

  I was lying flat among boulders when the Khmer transport came storming past, and as soon as its lights had died away I stumbled down to the jeep. It had rolled twice, and one wheel was still turning slowly in the moonlight. I took the flashlamp out of its bracket and found the last bottle of water lying among the rocks and picked it up and took it with me as I moved higher, away from the track.

  The moon was down, and in the east a pale flush of light threw the length of a mountain ridge into silhouette. Below and to the west the valley was lost beneath a veil of mist. A bird called, piping thinly in the silence.

  I hadn’t slept. The Khmer transport that had gone storming past the place where I had ditched the jeep had driven as far as the major road and turned north towards Pouthisat; after a while it had returned and plunged into the valley, following the track to the camp. Within thirty minutes the lights of a dozen vehicles had come swinging east towards the major road, half of them turning north and the others south to take up the hunt. It was long after midnight when I saw them again, threading their way through the valley back to the camp.

  I had lain down, then, using the half-empty plastic bottle for a head-rest, listening to the silence that had now come down front the hills to rest along the valley floor. But sleep was out of my reach. Bruises from unremembered blows were throbbing now; injuries I had not been aware of were bringing pain, demanding my attention. And there were thoughts running wild in my head, disallowing peace, baying like hounds at the kill.

  Later I would have to deal with them.

  When the flush of light in the east became strong enough to cast shadows I finished the last of the water and left my shelter in the rocks to climb into the eye of the sun towards the road.

  13 : DEBRIEFING

  ‘And your wife?’ I asked the man with no teeth.

  He looked down. ‘She dead,’ he said in halting French.

  So I didn’t ask directly about his sons, his other daughters.

  ‘I’m sorry. There’s just you and Cham?’ It was short for Chamnan.

  I had followed her home through the streets this morning, walking slowly. She was perhaps fifteen, though she looked more, hunger and shock and grief having wasted her small sharp-boned face. She was watching me now from the cramped little kitchen, her crutch leaning against the wall. By her eyes I saw she wasn’t sure she wanted to share her home with a round-eye and his odd manners. I’d followed her because I needed a safe-house, and if she had a father or a mother they wouldn’t favour the Khmer Rouge, wouldn’t be informers. We’d had to pause several times, Cham and I, on our way here, because this one had gone off not long ago, maybe near her school, and she was still trying to get used to the crutch - it was rubbing under her arm, and the rag she was using to cushion it kept shifting.

  ‘Yes,’ her father said - there was just himself and Cham here in the house. It was on stilts and made of mud and bamboo, and he’d told me there were two rooms to spare and I could take either one. His sons, I supposed, or his two other daughters wouldn’t be needing them any more.

  ‘I don’t want,’ I told him, ‘to be talked about. Do you understand that?’

  He looked surprised. All the round-eyes he’d seen hadn’t minded in the least being talked about; they’d come into his country with their good new clothes and stout boots and loud voices and treated him and his neighbours rather like children. I thought I’d better spell it out for him.

  ‘I don’t want anyone in the Khmer Rouge to know where I am.’

  He frowned, then nodded quickly, looking across at Chain and saying something in Khmer, his tone emphatic. ‘She understands?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes. We not talk about you. She can keep secrets. All my people know how to keep secrets.’

  ‘Of course.’ I offered him 2,000 riel per day for my board, and he was pleased, glancing quickly around the room as if he’d never realized its value.

  I slept through the heat of the day on the bamboo bed in the room I’d chosen; there was no other furniture in it except for a chest of drawers made from packing cases still with their Oxfam labels on them. This had been another daughter’s room; there were long black hairs still caught in the split ends of the bamboo behind the straw-filled pillow, and even though I’d been awake all night, sleep didn’t come easily, or soon. In none of the missions I’d so far worked had I felt anything in particular about the opposition: they had simply represented the target, the objective. The Khmer Rouge was different, and when the first wave of sleep came over me it was borne on a dark, tugging undertow of rage.

  On a patch of waste-ground near the railway station there was a bombed-out bus with Kanipong Chhnang still readable on the side, and I stood in the shadows watching it. The streetlamp on the corner was flickering the whole time as the power station struggled to cope with the load. Voices came from the cafe down the street, and a Mine Action van turned the corner and came past, its lights throwing the rubble on the waste-ground into sharp relief. Then Pringle arrived, dead on the minute, not looking around him as he skirted the building on foot and got into the bus, experienced enough to rely on me to have screened the area beforehand.

  ‘So we’ve got something now,’ he said when I’d finished debriefing, ‘for London.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment, hearing the acid tone. The streetlamp flickered again and this time went out, and we could see nothing now through the filth-covered windows of the bus. That was all right: it worked both ways. It’s always a strain when the local director and his executive are holed up at a rendezvous, and tonight I was a distinct risk to Pringle: I’d been seen at the Khmer Rouge camp yesterday and was recognizable, even though my two executioners manques were no longer a threat. I couldn’t show myself at the Hotel Lafayette or invite Pringle to my safe-house either, and the bus was the best place I could find; it was in deep shadow and didn’t interest anybody at night, though in the daytime it was a playground for children: there was a small rubber flip-flop in the gangway, and a broken toy gun - of course, we must train them young - on one of the ripped stained seats.

  ‘You located the opposition’s base,’ Pringle said in a moment, ‘and infiltrated it, bringing out valuable information as to personnel and equipment. In addition –’ he broke off as three shots sounded in the distance from two different guns, some kind of shoot-out, par for the course in exotic Pouthisat. ‘In addition,’ Pringle went on, ‘you confronted a high-ranking officer of the Khmer Rouge and can recognize him again. I think Mr Flockhart would certainly wish me to signal him.’

  An apple for the teacher - he sounded just like that bastard Loman. ‘I found the camp,’ I said, ‘but I’d imagine quite a few people in this town know it’s there, other than the Khmer Rouge. They know how to keep secrets in this place.’

  ‘Possibly so,’ Pringle’s voice came from beside me - we were sitting in the pitch dark now - ‘but despite their ability to keep secrets, we know the camp is there now, and that’s rather more important.’

  Had a point but I wasn’t in the mood to admit it; he was so bloody reasonable, wouldn’t give me a chance to spill my guts - some directors are like that, they don’t realize the shadow needs to debrief what’s on his mind as well as the information he’s picked up.

  ‘Then tell Flockhart,’ I said, ‘make his day. You’d also better tell him there are two more down.’ I hadn’t said anything in my debriefing about getting clear of the camp: it wasn’t usable information; but we’re always expected to report it if we put someone down.

  ‘Very well,’ Pringle said, and I heard him move, crossing his legs or something. ‘This was in self-defence?’

  ‘Call it that.’

  In a moment, ‘Was it? Or was it not? I’m sorry to –’

  ‘The first one, yes, I couldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t put him down right away - they both had loaded assault rifles. I could have got away from the second one by knocking him cold, but I’m not sure he would’ve thanked me - with no surgeons in this place his legs would’ve been paralyzed for life.’

  ‘I see. But during the confrontation, he had been attempting to kill you, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then London will be perfectly satisfied.’

  It was no big deal, but the hierarchy upstairs starts worrying if any particular shadow reports too many people down during the course of his mission: for some among us the taste of blood can become addictive, though I’ve never fancied it myself.

  ‘Well and good,’ I said.

  ‘And I understand perfectly.’ He didn’t.

  ‘Look, they were soldiers, weren’t they? Aren’t soldiers expected to give their lives for the cause?’ My voice hadn’t got louder; it just had an undertone and I couldn’t do anything about it.

  Pringle shifted slightly on the seat towards me. ‘Mr Flockhart - not to mention the Minister of Defence in London and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington - would be delighted if you were to put down the entire Khmer Rouge army in Cambodia, so I wouldn’t fret too much about the two you dealt with yesterday.’

  So he did understand - he’d looked at my profile on the files in London rather carefully. Even in this most inhuman of all trades I’ve never taken a man’s life without feeling another scar forming on the psyche, and this time I’d been able to sleep only because of the long black hairs caught in the bamboo, guilt relieved by rage.

  In a moment I said, ‘In any case, London won’t know, will it?’ Pringle had just said that London would be ‘perfectly satisfied’. The streetlamp flickered into life again, and I turned my head to look at him. ‘Or has that changed?’

  ‘It was a generic term. I meant Control, not London, But since you ask, it may be that the Bureau will be brought into things, somewhere along the line.’

  Oh really. I’d thought we were meant to be a one-man show, with Flockhart pushing a single pawn across the board towards the enemy lines. ‘Why?’ I asked Pringle.

  ‘Let me clear up a few aspects of the debriefing,’ he said, ‘before we get to that. Do you mind?’

  Kid gloves, and I didn’t like it. At a debriefing the director calls the shots.

  ‘No, but I’m not going to forget the question.’

  ‘I’m quite sure. But in the meantime, tell me why you think the Khmer Rouge has established a camp in this area, not far from the town?’

  ‘If they’re planning some kind of assault on the nineteenth - or at any time - it’d give them a springboard.’

  ‘An assault on Pouthisat?’

  ‘On Phnom Penh. This is the nearest airfield from the capital to the west, where the main camp is supposed to be. And by road it’s only a couple of hundred kilometres from the camp to Phnom Penh, if they want to transport troops en masse and by night.’

  Pringle uncrossed his legs again, crossed them the other way.

  I didn’t like it that he was so restless; he hadn’t been like this at the airport when we’d first met. But perhaps he was sitting on an exposed seat-spring, as I was.

  ‘Do you believe an assault is imminent?’ he asked me. ‘As close as the nineteenth - in five days’ time?’

  ‘The men I saw at the camp were active, wearing battledress, moving vehicles around. But it could’ve been simply because Colonel Choen was there.’

  ‘By “there”, do you mean paying a visit? Making an inspection? Or do you think he’s based there?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell.’

  ‘Make an educated guess.’

  ‘I’d say he’s visiting, just as he visited the people in Phnom Penh. Going the rounds, tightening security near the capital.’

  ‘And then he’ll report back to Pol Pot, in the west?’

  ‘Just a gut feeling.’

  ‘You’ve no actual –’

  ‘Look, you asked me for an educated guess and you’ve got it.

  Not at my best, no, but what do you expect, I’d done nothing useful yesterday, nothing, it didn’t matter what Pringle said, he was just eager to signal Control with something, to show we were in business, but we weren’t, not on any effective scale. Listen, what actually happened? I’d located a camp that half this town probably knew about and I’d got spat on by a street urchin in uniform and then led like a lamb to the bloody slaughter, and if it hadn’t been for my training and experience this whole thing, Salamander, would have gone straight down the drain, finito.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pringle said. ‘You’re perfectly right.’

  ‘Next question?’

  He uncrossed his legs. ‘I rather think that’s all. Now tell me, have you any –’

  ‘Why is it possible,’ I asked him carefully, ‘that the Bureau will be brought into things, somewhere along the line?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ As if he’d quite forgotten. He hadn’t. The streetlamp flickered and went out again, and I sensed that he was glad of it, didn’t want me to see his eyes when he spoke. ‘Nothing has changed, actually, no. Or not yet. We are still running a totally clandestine operation - not only vis-a-vis the Khmer Rouge but also the Bureau itself. But if you succeed in getting closer still to Pol Pot - to the man himself - your further actions might well involve the highest military authority in London and Washington.’

  ‘They’d give me the battalion I asked for?’

  ‘It’s not quite like that.’ He hitched himself towards me a little. ‘Neither the CIA in the States nor DI6 in London is officially interested in what happens in Cambodia at the present moment. There are too many other turbulent theatres of unrest engaging their attention both in Europe and Asia. But if it were known with certainty that Pol Pot means to make a final attempt to seize power again, and has the capacity, there might be a decision by shall we say - the more covert factions of government in Washington, London, Tokyo, Bonn and Paris to stop him - with or without reference to the United Nations.’

  ‘By military force?’

  ‘I suggest we leave that to them. The point is that when I say, “If it were known” that Pol Pot has this ambition, I clearly mean If you can find out. All we are asking you for, you see, is information, as I told you at the airport in Phnom Penh.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s asking just a little too much,’ I said, ‘for one solitary spook to stand in for the CIA and DI6 because they’re busy?’

  ‘I also suggest we leave that to Mr Flockhart.’

  ‘What you want first,’ I said as the streetlamp flickered into life again, ‘is the precise position of the main Khmer Rouge camp in the jungle, somewhere west.’ Because if this man was talking about ‘highest military authority’ and ‘covert factions of government’ he was talking about an air strike, and just because the US had brought coals on its head for doing it before, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t do it again if they thought it was necessary, history being repetitive.

  ‘We would very much like to know, yes,’ Pringle said, ‘the precise position of the main KR forces. And we might assume that this would also give us the precise whereabouts of Pol Pot.’

  ‘He’s still the target.’

  ‘Specifically. And you should bear that in mind.’

  ‘Noted.’