I could smell subterfuge again, acrid as brimstone, and when I got to the truth I would take, yes, the next plane to London.

  ‘The only way they can deliver the missiles,’ I said, ‘is by air. There’s no need for them to risk interception at sea or on the ground, if somebody finds out what they’re doing, as in point of fact we have. Slavsky’s going to move a helicopter in to mow the trees at nought feet and leave the radar screens totally blank. Given something like an SA 321L with an 8,000-kilo payload he can ship in fifty or sixty high-explosive and incendiary short-range ground-to-ground missiles, more than the KR would need to blast Phnom Penh into a fireball.’

  Pringle leaned back, tilting his head and watching me along his nose. There was a shot from somewhere outside in the streets, and I saw his pupils expand a degree and contract again. ‘You mean there’s no way anyone can stop the delivery of missiles to Pol Pot?’

  ‘Only at the source, and even if you found it and blew it up, the KR would simply go to any one of a hundred other sources and start again.’

  In a moment Pringle tilted his head down again and said, ‘We don’t seem to have many options, do we?’

  ‘I told you, we’d need a battalion.’

  ‘Do you believe Pol Pot would actually turn Phnom Penh into a fireball?’

  ‘He likes to kill, and by the million. So I think that’s what he’ll do, yes, if the king ignores his ultimatum.’

  Shots came, a burst this time and more distantly, no return fire. I thought of Gabrielle.

  Pringle folded his topographic map, his pale hands deft with the creases. ‘I need to know where you are,’ he said without looking up.

  I told him. I didn’t trust either him or Flockhart, but they wouldn’t blow me to the opposition: I was working for them.

  ‘I’ll signal Control again,’ he said, ‘on the debriefing. After he’s taken whatever action seems indicated, he’ll get back to me. At that time it’s possible he’ll want to speak to you personally, and I’ll send a contact to fetch you. But it won’t be at least until morning. Suppose, then’ - looking up now - ‘you make yourself available at your safe-house from nine o’clock onward?’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘I’ll be taking the call here in this office.’ He stood up, tucking the map into his pocket.

  ‘Code designation for the contact?’

  He suggested one, and at the door I said, ‘Perhaps you ought to put a peep on Slavsky, see if he goes anywhere interesting. But it’d have to be someone very good. If he sniffs any smoke he’ll go to ground.’

  ‘There are two people in Phnom Penh I could use, if –’

  ‘No one local; we need a real pro.’

  ‘Symes is in Bangkok.’

  ‘If you want to fly him over, yes, he’s first class.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’ He opened the door and waited for me to go out first, but I held back.

  ‘I need to make sure you’re clear.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ As if he’d forgotten. He hadn’t. It had just been another subtle gesture of deference to the executive they couldn’t afford to lose, and I noted it, I noted it well.

  Someone was screaming in the distance, the sound shrilling in the heat of the night; perhaps there’d be another little red dot for the map tomorrow. I stood watching Pringle’s thin figure receding as he walked away, his shadow trailing him and then moving ahead as he passed under a lamp, and the unnerving thought flashed into my mind that if he were suddenly attacked I might not feel inclined to save him.

  ‘I shot first, you see,’ Gabrielle said.

  She watched me from the low bamboo couch, perched on her haunches, naked, her arms across her knees, her body lit and shadowed by the lamp, the wide bandage around her like a sash. I wondered if she always made love like that, so desperately, despite her wound, or whether it had been because she’d thought it might be for the last time, life in this place being so cheap. I’d come to the mission to thank her for helping me with Slavsky, that was all, but she’d asked me to stay.

  I pressed the plunger of the big plastic water dispenser and poured her a glass of Kristal Kleer from Michigan, Illinois.

  ‘Then he shot back?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes. Then it was my turn again.’ She took the water and drank, her face silvered with moisture, her lashes casting shadows on her ivory cheekbones, the surface of the water sending reflections flashing softly across her forehead and the wall behind. She lowered the foam cup at last and I took it from her.

  ‘And you made a hit?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  So those were the three shots I’d heard when I’d been debriefing to Pringle in the burned-out bus. ‘How long have you been doing this?’

  She turned her head, watching the stars through the open window, faint in the heat haze. The moon had swung down towards the west by now: it had bathed us in its light as we’d made love, less gently than I’d wanted to because of her wound, but I’d been unable to calm her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘for quite a while. He was the seventh.’

  I drank some water and went back to the couch to be with her, and the bamboo creaked. God knew what Sister Hortense must have thought, earlier; she’d been the nun who’d let me into the mission, as Gabrielle had asked her to if I came by at whatever time.

  ‘Seven,’ I said, ‘isn’t a bad score.’ I realized now why she hadn’t shown any particular emotion when she’d told me at the hospital that the man who had wounded her was dead.

  ‘That’s a man’s way of killing, isn’t it? Keeping score, treating it like a game; I never thought I’d understand that. The thing is, I’m going to go on doing it until there aren’t any left, or they kill me.’

  ‘How did it start?’

  ‘Oh, I happened to see one of them actually setting a mine, under the arched gate of a school - this was in Phnom Penh. I reported it to the nearest Mine Action unit, and started thinking. I knew where most of the mines were being set, so I bought a rifle in the black market and started hanging out at night near the schools and the temples and the other target points, anywhere with just enough light to see by. I called out quietly to the first one, and I think the second, I don’t remember, so that he’d turn in my direction and see the gun and know he was going to die; then I stopped doing that - I wasn’t killing these people out of vengeance, I didn’t want to play God, I just wanted them dead, so they couldn’t hurt any more children.’ I watched a tear creeping on her cheek, jewelled in the light; she didn’t lift a hand to wipe it away. ‘When I was quite small,’ she said softly, ‘I started learning flower painting from a Japanese in my father’s consulate, and it quite consumed me - I knew I’d never want to do anything else but paint flowers, all my life long.’ She turned her head to look at me, smiling now. ‘I’m thirsty again.’

  I fetched more water for her, and didn’t ask her any more about the Khmer Rouge she was killing off by night, didn’t need to tell her how dangerous it was: she knew that, and must have found solace in it. Taking pictures of crippled children for her editors in Paris hadn’t been enough, in the end, and she’d needed to get involved.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more,’ she said.

  ‘Then we won’t.’

  ‘I want to make love again, while there’s still time.’

  We slept, afterward, with her head buried against me and her knees drawn up, and sometimes a nightmare jerked her awake and she had to get her breath before she pulled me tightly and fiercely against her and slept again, sighing like a child.

  Soon after dawn there was thunder in the hills, and by eight o’clock, rain. I was soaked by the time I’d walked to the safe house, and so was the contact who came for me soon afterward, telling me I was needed at the place of the pig, the code designation Pringle and I had agreed on.

  17 : ZERO

  ‘You did rather well.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ I said.

  Flockhart favoured me with one of his pauses. The line was full of squelch: this was coming through Moscow’s Intersputnik - Pringle had told me the Australian satellite was on overload.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘My friend here,’ I told him, ‘feels you might not agree I’ve produced anything all that conclusive.’ 12°3’N x 103°l0’E.

  Pringle was watching me attentively, silhouetted against the rain-slashed window.

  ‘That is to be seen,’ Flockhart said. ‘But I’d prefer not to pass it on to our people or Washington at this stage, or for that matter the crowned head.’

  ‘Our people’ presumably being the UK Ministry of Defence, who would brief the prime minister; ‘Washington’ presumably being the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would brief the president; and the ‘crowned head’ being King Sihanouk. Because this was the only possible action anyone could be expected to take if they were ready to rely on Boris Slavsky’s map: an air strike.

  ‘However,’ I heard Flockhart saying, ‘you’ve certainly made a good start.’

  I left that.

  ‘We simply require to take things a little further.’

  I realized he had to watch what he said on a satellite line, but Flockhart also had a penchant for the cryptic, as I’d learned when he’d first talked to me at the Cellar Steps. They get like that, the controls, after years of pushing the pawns across the board in the signals room: they end up talking like a cipher grid. I waited again. He’d go on when he was ready.

  ‘We can’t see the wood at the moment, you understand, even by satellite. What we need is to confirm the evidence, physically.’

  I didn’t answer. He was out of his bloody mind.

  ‘Then everyone would know that action could be taken on a sound premise, and would therefore succeed.’

  ‘Yes, but there isn’t time. Not if that deadline is real.’ The nineteenth.

  ‘You would require, what? Twelve hours?’

  Or less, but he was talking about a suicide run, a low-level chopper survey with telescopic cameras. ‘We can’t see the wood’ translated as ‘we can’t see the Khmer Rouge camp for the trees’, even with Landsat, since it was in deep jungle. I understood that, and I understood that neither the UN nor the US would order a strike based solely on a map position. The problem was more local: I didn’t see how Salamander could keep on running with a dead executive.

  I asked Flockhart, ‘Have you ever put your hand into a beehive?’

  A squeal came from the room next door - I suppose someone had picked up Little Stinker and he wanted to be put down again.

  ‘What was that?’ Flockhart asked.

  ‘A pig.’ Over the line it must have sounded like an interrogation cell near closing time.

  ‘Given adequate magnification,’ Flockhart said in a moment, ‘you wouldn’t have to go in as close as that.’

  ‘You can hear a fan at five miles, for Christ’s sake.’ Too late to edit that: I’d slipped, showing the nerves, and he would have noticed. It was this that should have warned me.

  ‘Speed,’ Flockhart’s voice came persuasively, ‘would be of the essence, of course. Speed and surprise.’

  A night sortie with infra-red cameras - he’d got it all worked out. But he wouldn’t be sitting in the chopper when it got blown out of the sky.

  The pig squealed again and it plucked at the nerves. That should have warned me too. ‘You’d never find anyone to do it,’ I said.

  ‘We’re thinking of you, of course.’

  ‘Look, I haven’t got more than fifty hours behind me in one of those things.’ The only training we get at Norfolk is just enough to give us a chance if the pilot suffers a heart attack.

  ‘But you’ve used them before, and most effectively.’

  The rain drummed on the roof of the building, and a trickle had started below the door, dark on the scarred concrete. Pringle had moved his foot out of its way, was watching me again with his cool grey eyes. I didn’t think he could hear what Flockhart was saying, but he could hear me all right and he’d know what was on. Flockhart would have briefed him on it in any case while the contact was on his way to fetch me. We need him to agree to this, and I want you to do all you can at your end to persuade him.

  But there wasn’t anything Pringle could do: I didn’t trust him, didn’t respect him. Flockhart I would listen to; he was a major player, was seasoned, had authority. I didn’t trust him either, but yes, I would listen.

  ‘For this job,’ I said, ‘you’d need an ace.’ We were working with a deadline and there was another rainstorm in and we couldn’t wait for it to clear, would have to fly half-blind to the target, and if the rain was still coming down when we reached it there wouldn’t be any point in even turning the cameras on.

  ‘We have one,’ I heard Flockhart saying.

  ‘An ace?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Covered himself, in case I said no.

  ‘He’s tired of life?’

  ‘He is not unsanguine.’

  ‘I know him?’

  ‘It’s unlikely. But he’s world class.’

  And a Cambodian, he must be, burning with the holy fire of love for his country, ready to do or die. No one else would touch this one.

  ‘What’s the state of preparedness?’ I asked Flockhart.

  ‘Launch zero.’

  Oh, Jesus, he’d been working through the night, he and Pringle, finding a pilot and a machine and putting them on stand-by at the airfield over there, locating the cameras, setting them up. Or had they done it days ago? The first time I’d met Pringle at the airport in Phnom Penh he’d told me that the first objective for Salamander was to get information on Pol Pot. I was close to doing that, had found him on the map, would have to follow up, make certain, get close to him with the cameras, take his bloody picture and send it to London, wish you were here, the weather’s marvellous.

  The weather was ten-tenths shit and I was standing here with the phone slippery with sweat because of the heat in this stinking hole and because I should have been warned when the pig had squealed and my nerves had jumped, should have been warned even then that I was going to do what he said, what Flockhart said, because I was already committed to putting my neck on the block in the name of the salamander, whatever the chances were of coming out of it with anything to show, of coming out of it alive; chances? surely you must be joking, they’ll have weapons out there, never mind about the leaves overhead blocking their view, they can send up a square mile of fire power in a single blast the moment they hear the rotors, I wish to God they wouldn’t keep that stinking pig in here.

  ‘Do you have any questions?’

  Flockhart.

  ‘Yes. Who’s going to replace me, if I come unstuck?’

  Another of his bloody pauses. I suppose he was a bit surprised, the brave little ferret in the field had actually agreed to getting himself blown into Christendom without too much persuasion.

  ‘No one would replace you.’

  Bloody liar. The control always lines up a replacement when he sends his executive on a suicide run; I’d been one of them myself on half the missions I’d worked, walking in a dead man’s shoes.

  ‘There’s no replacement?’

  ‘You must take it how you will,’ Flockhart said, ‘but for this undertaking you are irreplaceable.’

  Pringle was watching me, probably saw the reaction in my eyes: you don’t blank everything off when you’re with your director in the field, you’re supposed to trust him.

  ‘You mean this is a one-shot thing?’

  Silence, then: ‘Yes. You are our only chance. Surely you realized that.’

  ‘Why should I?’ Then I understood. ‘Where is the Sacred Bull?’

  It’s what we call the Bureau, we the beleaguered minions in the field.

  ‘Nowhere,’ Flockhart said.

  So he was still running Salamander solo, without a signals board, without support in the field, even without a replacement for the executive, going over the heads of Administration and reporting directly to the prime minister. Only four people, then, were privy at this stage to the mission: the PM, Flockhart, Pringle and I. Until they brought in Washington, until they had to, if an air strike was to be ordered.

  ‘When will that change?’ I asked Flockhart carefully. The stakes seemed suddenly rather high with only four players in the game.

  ‘At some time in the future.’

  Shouldn’t have asked.

  Pringle watched me as the trickle of water spread across the concrete, as the pig in there squealed again and the rain hit the window aslant in the wind and the leaves of the sugar palms out there shone steel-bright under the storm as I stood there looking for more questions to ask, for more information, some kind of reassurance that I wasn’t expected to go into this phase of the mission with too much left to chance. But there weren’t any questions left; Flockhart had briefed me as far as he needed to, had already set the whole thing up, pilot, chopper, cameras, and had given me the score: launch zero.

  ‘We’ve got a rainstorm going on here,’ I told him. ‘We’ll have to wait till it stops.’

  ‘Of course.’ His voice was almost gentle. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’

  18 : FLAK

  ‘My two sons were killed,’ the man perched on the oil drum said in local French, and lit another Gauloise from the stub of the last. ‘They were in the Fields.’

  He was Captain Khay of the Cambodian Air Force, and he’d been seconded by his squadron to fly me to 12°3’N x 103° 1 0’E. The Sikorsky S-67 was standing behind us in the hangar, squat, matt black, ugly as sin.

  Khay stared out at the rain as it came slanting across the open doors of the hangar, stirring the bright grey puddles into boiling steel. The sun was still in the sky somewhere, but low now and drowned in the haze; the light across the airfield was bleak, electric, looking as if someone had forgotten to switch it off.