Impact

22

Ford sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at the fire and listening to the sounds of the jungle night. The dark forest enclosed them like a humid dungeon.

Khon reached over, raised the lid of the pot cooking on the fire, and stirred the contents with a stick. He said, his voice laden with skepticism, "So--what's next? How are you going to blow up the mine?"

Ford sighed.

"During the Killing Fields," Khon said, "I saw my uncle shot in the head. You know what his crime was? He owned a cooking pot."

"Why was that a capital offense?"

"That's the Khmer Rouge. That's how they think. Owning a cooking pot meant he hadn't gotten into the collective spirit, the communist spirit. It didn't matter he had a five-year-old boy who was starving. So they executed his boy in front of him, and then killed him. These are the men you're up against, Wyman."

Ford broke a stick, tossed the pieces in the fire. "Tell me about Brother Number Six."

"He was part of Pol Pot's student group in Paris in the fifties. He became a member of the Central Committee during the Killing Fields, went by the name of Ta Prak."

"Background?"

"Educated family from Phnom Penh. The bugger ordered the killing of his own family--brothers, sisters, mother, father, grandparents. He held it up as a badge of honor to show the purity of his ideals."

"Nice guy."

"After the death of Pol Pot in '98, he disappeared in the north and started smuggling drugs and gems. His 'revolutionary ideals' degenerated into criminality."

"What motivates him now?"

"Survival. Pure and simple."

"Not money?"

"You need money to survive. What does fucking Brother Number Six want? I tell you what he wants: to live out the last of his days in peace and quiet and die a natural death. This is what the mass murderer wants: to die of old age, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. He's almost eighty, but he clings to life like a young man. All that horror in that valley, the mine, the enslavement--it's all about squeezing out those last years of life. You see, if the bastard relaxes his grip, even for a second, he's a dead man and he knows it. Not even his soldiers will back him up."

"And then an asteroid falls into his lap."

Khon stared at him across the fire. "Asteroid?"

Ford nodded. "The explosion that the monks talked about, the crater, the flattened trees, the radioactive gemstones--everything points to an asteroid impact."

Khon shrugged, tossed a stick in the fire. "Let your government take care of it."

"Did you see the kids picking through that pile of rocks? It's killing them. If we don't destroy the mine, they'll die."

After a silence, Khon rummaged in his pack and removed a pint bottle. "Johnnie Walker Black," he said. "Clears the mind." He tossed it over.

Ford cracked and unscrewed the cap, raised the bottle. "Prost." He took a sip, then another, and passed it back. Khon helped himself, placed the bottle between them. He lifted the lid on the rice, nodded, took the pot from the fire, and scooped out steaming rice onto tin plates.

Ford accepted the plate and they ate in silence as the fire died down into ashy coals.

To live out the last of his days and die a natural death. If that's all that motivated him now, perhaps dealing with Brother Number Six wouldn't be so difficult after all.

"Khon, I have the glimmer of an idea."