Quiller Salamander

10: LEOPARD

It was an hour before a black splinter floated into the glare above the horizon, the sun flashing on it as it began turning into its descent, becoming an aircraft, drifting on its flight path above the foothills to the south-west with its strobe sparking in the saffron haze as the landing gear came down and its profile tilted as it settled towards the runway, a Czechoslovakian-built L 410 Turbolet flying the Trans-Kampuchean insignia at the tail.

It was a passenger plane, so I started the jeep and moved round the perimeter track to the terminal building and parked near the bus station and walked across to the arrivals wing, finding adequate cover on the far side and well clear of the car rental desks and the newsstand and the baggage console and the toilets.

Fourteen passengers came through, one of them Pringle, none of them Colonel Choen. I had never seen Choen, but I would know him when I did.

Pringle wasn't looking around for me, wouldn't expect me to be here, wouldn't expect me to approach him even if I were.

I went back to the jeep and took up station again halfway between the terminal building and the freight sheds.

The rising heat shimmered like a lake across the runway, and I sat with my eyes closed now behind the sunglasses to protect the retinae from the glare, checking the south horizon at intervals through the slits of my lids.

Eleven-ten, but this one wasn't coming in: it was a Beriev Tchaika amphibian, lowering across the east towards the Tonle Sap.

Noon minus twelve and a Skyvan 3M came rumbling out of the south like an elephant, and I started the jeep again and moved towards the freight sheds and was there when the crew came off, three Caucasians, one of them limping, all of them lighting cigarettes as they walked across to the office.

At noon I opened the first bottle of Evian and drank half, holding it like a trumpet and seeing beyond it the helicopter moving in from the south, lower than the other aircraft had been, tracing its path across the mountains to the south-east now and turning, making its approach, fifteen degrees high. I put the cap back on the bottle and stowed it with the others, not taking my eyes off the chopper, noting the camouflage paint, the absence of any insignia, simply the identification letters, F-KYP, the strobe flashing, the fronds of the sugar palms waving under the downdraught from the twin rotors, a Kamov KA-26, touching down within fifty yards of the freight sheds as I started up again and found cover between a hangar and the loading dock as a camouflaged staff car with the fabric top raised came in from the perimeter road and pulled up, two men in battle fatigues dropping to the ground and going towards the helicopter as the rotors slowed and the cabin door came open.

I could hear his voice already, barking an order to the pilot, and his walk was as I'd expected, a militarily-correct parade-ground strut as he crossed the apron, snapping back a salute to the two men and swinging himself into the staff car on the front passenger's side, barking again as the driver got in and asked him something and nodded quickly and started the engine.

Colonel Choen.

Access — of a sort. Access to General Kheng and finally to Pol Pot, if I got it right.

'Your first objective,' Pringle had told me at Phnom Penh airport, 'is to gain information on that man.'

So I waited until the car was through the gates and halfway round the perimeter road and then took up the tag.

I watched the mirror.

Thirty-five minutes ago the staff car had stopped outside a white two-storey building next to a temple, its walls bullet-scarred and covered with faded slogans. Colonel Choen and one of his escorts had gone into the building. The other man, the driver, was leaning against the car, smoking his third cigarette.

An hour and fifteen minutes ago I should have telephoned Pringle at the Hotel Lafayette, but that was when the helicopter was landing, and I'd had no chance since. The traffic in Pouthisat was the same as in Phnom Penh: motorized vehicles with native drivers ploughed through everything else on the narrow streets — cyclos, oxen, pushcarts, bikes, dogs and chickens, and it had been difficult to keep track of the staff car without moving in too close.

Now I sat watching the mirror.

It would have been nice to fish out the half-bottle of Evian from behind the seat, but I wanted to keep movement to the minimum. I was parked facing away from the building Choen had gone in, with the jeep tight against the wall of a storage shed. The plastic rear window, scratched and yellowed, wasn't wide enough to let the Khmer driver see anything of my silhouette unless I moved, even if he took any interest. He was a rebel soldier, not an espion; if he'd been in our trade I couldn't have parked the jeep here at all.

The heat pressed down, and instead of thinking about the bottle of Evian I thought about Salamander. It was beginning to look like a full-blown mission, despite the fact that we had no signals board in London, no contacts or couriers in the field. We had, at least, access of a sort: I was keeping surveillance on an officer in Pol Pot's forces and it might not turn out to be totally a waste of time. He might well come out of that building and get into his car and be taken back to the airfield and the helicopter: the driver had been told to wait for him. But if so, I at least had a fix on the building itself and could make a night reconnaissance, given the absence of guards, or the absence of guards difficult — in terms of number — to silence and subdue.

It was beginning to seem conceivable that Flockhart, my control in London, wasn't totally out of his mind. He needed — for whatever reason — information on Pol Pot, and the only way he could normally expect to get it was by forming his own little army of military. intelligence troops and sending them in — and they would have to be Asian, ideally Cambodian or Vietnamese. But the Bureau hasn't got any Asian troops, nor is it equipped to recruit any, administratively, economically or politically.

The driver was lighting his fourth cigarette from the butt of the third, dragging the smoke in deep and holding it, not a man, you would say, with enough oxygen available to his muscles to afford him much endurance, if he were, for example, attacked.

But then of course he had his Chinese-made assault rifle, if you were slow enough to let him use it.

The Bureau, moreover, hasn't got even one Asian on its shadow executive staff, or he would have been the obvious choice for Salamander. All Flockhart had had when he dined with me at the Cellar Steps was a standard model ferret bored out of his gourd after six weeks without a mission, someone who would take anything on simply to keep his nerves in tune.

And Holmes had known that, when we'd sat in the Caff drinking Daisy's undrinkable tea.

You know Mr Flockhart? He's quite good. Some people find him a bit on the enigmatic side, doesn't give much away. He also comes and goes, runs a mission or two and disappears for a while.

For a control like that — senior, with the ability to pick and choose — I had been the perfect choice: seasoned enough to work an operation where a single shadow could conceivably get through to the objective while a whole battalion might fail, and desperate enough to take it on.

So I found it comforting, as I watched the Khmer driver chain-light his fifth cigarette in the mirror, to realize that Flockhart might not simply have chosen to set me running in a manifestly doomed mission just to find out if I had a chance in a thousand of bringing it home.

We seek comfort, my good friend, we the stalwart ferrets in the field, where we can find it.

The sun's weight pressed down on the canvas top of the jeep; its light shimmered along the bonnet and sent reflections fanning against the wall of the storage shed; the day staggered under the burden of the afternoon sky. No one was moving in the narrow angle of the street that was all I could see through the windscreen.

Three women had passed, minutes ago, their sarongs clinging to their stick-like bodies, their faces dark and featureless in the shade of their raffia hats as they pushed their cart along, piled with junk — to them, presumably, treasure, the sum of their worldly goods. People were leaving the cities, Gabrielle had told me, hoping to find safety in the countryside, in the mountains, in the rice fields, before whatever was to happen to Cambodia cut short their lives.

A cyclo driver had followed them, minutes later, bowed over his rusting handlebars half-comatose, a gaunt dog lurching after him, one eye lost beneath a black cluster of flies.

The Khmer driver lit another cigarette, took a turn, kicking the baked mud of the street with his boot, hitching his assault rifle higher, took a turn back, then looked suddenly up at the steps of the two-storey building.

One fifty-seven, and Colonel Choen came down to the street with his escort and climbed into the car.

Sweat cooled on my shoulders as I sat up straight and put my fingers onto the ignition key, watching the mirror, waiting. The staff car was facing away from the town, from the airfield, and if it was going to turn back it would take the next side street and turn left again and come past the storage shed. That was all right: I wouldn't by then be visible below the windscreen; there would simply be a jeep standing here.

If the staff car kept on going in the same direction I. would need to catch up, but at a distance. That was all right too, but less easy: it would need noisy bursts of acceleration in the silence of the siesta hours.

I started up and waited for thirty seconds, forty, fifty, heard the sound of the staff car fading and moved off and took a right and a right and a left and saw it ahead of me, bouncing across potholes in the distance, and we settled down at five hundred yards, heading out of the city and then taking a road south with the foothills forming along the horizon and the sun high and in front of us, casting short shadows.

There was no other traffic and I dropped back, letting the staff car increase the distance to a mile and checking the mirror, hoping for moving cover, but there was nothing coming up behind.

A bullock cart lay on its side near the road, the beast still harnessed, lowing and kicking; I couldn't see the driver. Egrets crossed the skyline in a black skein against the glare of the sun, dipping towards water somewhere. A girl sat on a pile of rice bags near a track to a farm, nursing an infant, her round raffia hat shading it from the sun. A snake, crushed by wheels, lay across the road in the shape of a question mark.

In fifteen kilometres we were among the foothills and I closed the distance between us, reaching behind me for the bottle of Evian and draining it in gulps and dropping it back behind the seat as the road began twisting between outcrops and I had to close up again, this time to within three or four hundred yards of the staff car, less, too close, too close for comfort, dropping back again, letting its profile shrink into the distance.

Potholes suddenly, and the jeep shuddered, the tyres skating across the surface, and I had to let the speed die, couldn't touch the brakes. The sun swung to the right, to the left, to the right again and then steadied as the road straightened and I saw it running ahead, empty now, no staff car.

I didn't think they'd seen me and increased their speed. They wouldn't do that. If they saw me and wanted to know why I was on this road behind them they'd just slow and block my path and stop and ask questions; these were the Khmer Rouge.

They'd turned off somewhere, at a time when they'd been out of sight past an outcrop.

I swung the jeep in a U-turn and gunned up.

Access of a sort, providing I didn't lose the target. A hundred kph on the clock and then slowing through the hills, seeing nothing, the sun swinging behind me now, bringing relief from the glare.

Target not seen.

The stretch of potholes again and I hit the brakes in time and let the jeep skitter across them, one of the headlights shattering to the vibration, glass tinkling against the bodywork in the slipstream.

Target still not seen but there was a track to the left, hidden by boulders until I was almost on it, had to use the brakes and let the rear end swing through the U as I gunned up to get the traction back and then turned to follow the track, baked mud and loose stones, the surface natural, the way ahead formed simply by the passage of wheels over the passage of time.

A small leopard vaulted a rock and turned to watch the jeep go past.

Target.

The sun flashing across its rear window as it turned in the distance ahead and below me among the hills as the track descended, stones rattling under the chassis.

We were in a ravine, with rocks rising on each side, their shadows on the right, sharper now, the air less humid. I let the speed die again, losing the staff car from sight but not worrying.

There wouldn't be another track leading away from this one: the terrain was too steep, too rocky.

Flash and I saw the target again, much smaller now. But even at this distance 1 wouldn't be safe if they looked back and saw the jeep; this wasn't a public road, and any vehicle on it would belong to the forces of the Khmer Rouge. This was their private territory. It wouldn't have been possible to get even this far if I hadn't chosen a camouflaged vehicle, but that wouldn't help me if they took an interest and brought me to a stop.

There would have to be a break-off point: at some time I would need to decide when I was as close as I could go to the target without risking exposure.

Flash and the staff car was turning again, but this time onto a side track where the rocks gave way to flat terrain half a mile across and covered with dark green foliage — scrub or short trees, from this distance I couldn't tell which.

Then the target vanished.

It hadn't turned to one side or the other: the sun had been steady on the rear window, then had gone out like a lamp switched off.

I cut down my speed, rolled for a hundred yards and then put the jeep onto a slope of firm ground that would let me turn without having to back up, give me a chance to get out fast if I had to. Then I sat looking at the flat green terrain down there, some kind of plantation except for the rocks strewn across it, no individual bushes, no clearly-defined trees, just a stretch of — right, got it now — camouflage netting.

This was how the staff car had vanished like that in an instant, passing under the edge of the screen and out of sight.

The camp was perfectly placed, too far from the main track to attract visitors and too far west of the airfield in Pouthisat to be seen from the lowering flight paths. But even so, it had been decided to rig the camouflage screen to provide total concealment from the air.

I switched off the engine, because this was the break-off point. I was as close as I could get to the target, was too close, even, for safety: if there were guards mounted there at the camp's perimeter the jeep would be in sight of them.

The heat lay across the canyon, the sun burning its path through the sky to the south and touching fire from the rocks, dazzling the eye, leaving the lungs stifled. Under the spread of camouflage down there it would be cooler; perhaps that too was its purpose.

There was nothing more I could do here. I couldn't hope to infiltrate an armed camp, even by night; let it be enough that I had a fix on it; the day hadn't been wasted. But as I reached for the ignition I stopped and froze as a sound came into the silence, echoing among the rocks. Another vehicle was on the move, coming the way we had come, and I slipped across the passenger's seat and dropped to the ground, crouching, listening to the sound of tyres scattering loose stones, one of them hitting the side of the jeep with the force of a bullet.

They would see the jeep standing here, not far from the track, couldn't miss it. It was camouflaged, a military or paramilitary vehicle — that was why I'd chosen it — but it didn't carry any kind of insignia. Had the staff car carried insignia? I hadn't been close enough to the rear to see if it had or not. Did all the Khmer Rouge vehicles have insignia? It was important, because if they did, the one moving past me now would hit the brakes and slide to a halt across the stones and boots would thud to the ground and the driver would come walking across.

I waited.

Exhaust gas came drifting, and another stone hit the jeep and the nerves jerked because it was so like a shot.

Insignia. Did they carry insignia, the transports of the Khmer Rouge forces?

The vehicle wasn't slowing; no brakes, no boots. It was alongside now and still moving at the same speed, equipment, maybe a spade, rattling in its straps to the vibration. Voices, calling in Khmer above the noise. What were they saying? What's that jeep doing there, it's not one of ours, there's no insignia?

No. They weren't interested, hadn't noticed anything wrong about it, assumed the jeep was out of petrol and that the driver had walked to the camp to fetch some.

Moving on, they were moving on, and I gave them sixty seconds and climbed back into the jeep and started up straight away, using the other vehicle's engine as sound cover as it rolled into the camp past the guards.

Were there guards? That was important too.

Started up and made a tight turn and drove back along the track, using the manual gear change to shift ratios with as few revs as the engine could take, keeping the noise down.

So you located the camp and came away, with no opposition?

I was lucky. There weren't any guards at the perimeter.

The sun on my right now and a little behind me, stones banging under the wings, the canvas top flexing as the chassis twisted to the uneven surface of the track, nothing in the mirrors until the flash came, the flash of the sun across glass a mile behind me, the glass of a windscreen, the windscreen of a vehicle on the move.

My thoughts on the debriefing had been premature, then, presumptuous, counting chickens, shit, we need policy here, and make it quick.

I could gun up and try driving my way out but I didn't know what vehicle they were using — it could be half as powerful as mine, or twice. There would be two men on board: if they were coming to check out the jeep there would be two of them, both armed. Add, then, the weight of one man plus the weight of his assault rifle and ammunition belt, but that wouldn't give me any advantage if they were driving something more powerful.

Policy, then? Because if we're going to make a run for it we'd better start now.

The flash came again, brighter. They were closing the distance, coming flat out, the vehicle bouncing, the windscreen flashing like a semaphore, it wasn't just a routine transport leaving the camp. There had, then, been guards, and they'd seen the jeep when I'd turned, and they'd sounded the alert…

Decision, yes, and this was it, not terribly sophisticated: I couldn't hope to drive clear because it was daylight and I was stuck on this one narrow track and they could start picking me off at any time now, any time they wanted to.

So relax: 50 kph on the clock and I left it like that, medium speed, out for a Sunday afternoon drive, this was a pleasant route, winding through the rocks, wildflowers here and there, yellow and red, a scenic route, you might say, we must bring Fred and Gertrude here next weekend, they'll really -

Shots, just a short burst, and then fluting overhead, a warning, then, their aim couldn't be that bad at half a mile. I didn't slow, waited for the second burst, got it, took my foot off the throttle, stuck my hand out of the window and waved, yes, I've got the message, hold your bloody fire.

I was stationary at the side of the track when they arrived, two men in military fatigues with red check kramas, both carrying assault rifles as they jumped down from their Chinese-built jeep while I sat with my hands on the wheel, raising them as they prodded with their guns, shouting Khmer in my face.

'English,' I said. 'Anglae.' It was one of the few words I knew.

More shouting, while one of them looked around inside the jeep, turning the cushions over, scattering the bottles of Evian water.

'Qui es toi?' the other one asked, using the familiar, but of course, the Khmer Rouge can do that, they can do anything they like.

'Je suis Anglais.' I used one hand, cautiously, to show them my papers, and they took it in turns to look at them, didn't give them back. My papers, I said indignantly, give me my papers back, not bloody likely, who do you think you are, working out the odds, I was working out the odds while they walked slowly round the jeep, not looking for anything, simply showing me they weren't going to miss anything, I was to take them seriously, even with those red checked kramas round their heads; a dishcloth is a dishcloth, whatever you choose to call it.

Then one of them slapped the bonnet and shouted 'Viens!' and jerked his head towards their jeep.

'Mais jai trompe de chemin,' I said indignantly, 'c’est tout!' Missed the road, that was all, but he wasn't interested, pushed his rifle into my chest. The other one joined in, so I said 'Merde!' and left it at that, having established my cover story, and climbed out of my jeep and into theirs, one of the bastards going too close to the spine with his gun, prodding my back, no respect for the vertebrae, and this is one of the things, the many things, that can tilt the balance and leave you undone, a pinched nerve robbing you of agility just when you need it most — we shall have to start thinking now, my good friend, of things like that, start making preparations in the mind; that's a hornets' nest down there, if you'll forgive the cliche, and my presence has been requested, so that death might not be long in coming unless we are nimble: these are the Khmer Rouge, and they murdered a million souls in the Killing Fields.

You've only got to make one little mistake with Pol Pot, and that's your lot. Tucker, drumming his fingers on the control column of the Siai-Marchetti. People have disappeared, you know what I'm saying?

Yes indeed.

Then one of them got behind the wheel and started up while the other dragged my jacket half off and used the sleeves to bind my arms behind me; then he whipped the krama offhis head and tied it round my eyes and pulled it tight; it smelled of sweat and something else — hair oil? Scents were important now because we were in a red sector and I couldn't see anything — scents, sounds, tactile impressions, whatever information I could pick up, however slight: I might need to recognize this man again, and the hair oil might do it for me if he came close enough.

Bloody gun in my ribs, to remind me not to do anything silly; he hadn't cleaned the barrel for God knew how long, I could smell it, these weren't the Queen's Light Infantry.

Stones pinging from under the tyres as we bumped our way down to the camp, the driver shouting something in Khmer and my escort shouting back, We going to put him against a wall, are we? But we must use the mind for preparation, yes, not for glum conjecture.

Twilight suddenly, cast by the camouflage net as we rolled to a halt, no more than a lessening of the light at the edges of the krama by a few degrees but enough to inform me. A strong smell of canvas — the camouflage net — and diesel oil, rubber, cooking stoves, tobacco smoke, chickens.

The rifle prodding again. 'Bouges pas!' Don't move, but of course not, with my arms bound, what would it profit me, you espece d'idiot?

The other man had gone off — to fetch someone in authority? — but my escort stayed close, the muzzle of his gun resting against my chest the whole time. There was a line of light along the top of the blindfold but even when I turned my eyes upward as far as they'd go there was no useful vision taking place: it was just peripheral, capable of detecting movement but no images.

'Look,' I said in French, 'you're making a mistake.'

The man didn't answer.

'And that's okay,' I said. 'People make mistakes. I do it all the time. But the thing is, my government isn't going to like — '

He told me to shut the fuck up and when the other man came back they hustled me across the camp to a concrete cell and threw me inside and slammed the door and locked it.