Quiller Salamander

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.

'So I am doing this,' the captain said, 'for my sons, for the king, and for my people.'

'Doing this?'

Khay looked at me with a jerk of his head. 'This sortie.'

'You wouldn't fancy it,' I said, 'otherwise.' And listened carefully.

'How do the Americans say?' He tried out his English, 'You must do a thing — ' then shook his head.

'You gotta do whatcha gotta do.'

'That is right, yes!' The smile didn't reach his eyes; they simply narrowed. His eyes had never lit, I would have thought, since his sons had died. 'That is why I do it.'

'Did you volunteer?' I asked him.

'No. I am chosen because I am the most experienced pilot in the service, with the helicopters.' He flicked ash off his Gauloise.

'What happened to your hand?'

'Oh' — he looked at it — 'it is snake bite, long time ago. Cobra.'

'You must be pretty fit.'

He shrugged. 'One simply has to relax. Western people drink whole bottle of whisky, sometimes works. Meditation best. So why do you do this?'

'Why am I making this sortie?'

'Yes.'

'You gotta do whatcha gotta do.'

The grimace. 'I think that is what you will say.'

He got off the oil drum and walked towards the curtain of rain at the entrance to the hangar, looking at the sky. At the mine-clearing unit they'd said the storm was going to last another twelve hours, but Pringle had ordered me down here to meet Khay, who said it could clear by midnight. The sun must be down by now; the sugar palms were lost in the haze and the terminal building was marked only by its lights.

In a moment Khay turned and came back, pulling a map from his jump suit and spreading it across the oil drum. 'We will go soon,' he said. 'Maybe another hour — the wind is shifting. But if we run into any more rain we will simply fly around it. If that is not possible, then we will put her down and wait it out, maybe here, or here, somewhere between the mountains. We have rations and water for three days, and enough fuel for 400 kilometres. We can sleep in the machine if we need to. Have you any questions?'

'What's your ideal schedule?'

'My ideal schedule is that we go in and take the photographs within an hour, maybe ninety minutes, and get out again' — he glanced up at me — 'if they let us.' He folded the map. 'I do not want to have to fly this thing in the daylight. The identification numbers are false and we could be challenged by radio; there are so many factions, you see, suspicious of each other, quite apart from the Khmer Rouge. This is not an air force machine, with that identification, but it is obviously assigned to night flying, and that could raise questions.' He lit another Gauloise, his hand not quite steady — not, I thought, because he was worried about the flight but because his nerves had been under strain ever since Pol Pot had taken over the country. I'd noticed it in others; the people here lived in the constant fear that it could happen again.

'Is this aircraft armed?' I asked him.

Khay shrugged. 'Normally we carry 30mm barbette-mounted cannon, but it was taken off before I assumed command.' He dropped his cigarette and flattened it against the concrete with his flying-boot. 'In any case we are not going to hang around the target area long enough for them to send up a helicopter. We go in, we come out, and if the camera does not jam we get some pictures.'

This was at 19:00 hours, and by 20:00 we saw a drenched moon floating in the night sky as the wind shifted again and then died, leaving the airfield steaming. There was still a light rain coming down at 21:15 but Khay said it didn't worry him, and climbed onto the seat of the work-horse and pulled the Sikorsky out to the tarmac.

We took off twenty minutes later into dead air with the rotor blades churning the puddles into mist as we became airborne and headed south-west towards the sea.

He'd had this helicopter standing by for days, Pringle, on instructions from London; for a week, ever since I'd made contact with him for the first time at the airport in Phnom Penh. He must have.

Because Flockhart was smart.

'ETA ten minutes,' I heard Khay calling above the crackling of the rotors.

'Roger.'

Flockhart was smart enough to know that if I took Salamander on at all I would hit the first objective before long: information on Pol Pot. And he'd known it might have to be confirmed by air reconnaissance, and so had made overtures through Sihanouk's intelligence arm to secure an aircraft and have it put on readiness. Flockhart, I was beginning to understand, left nothing to chance, providing he had control. But he was in London now, with the buds of the daffodils just beginning to show in the pale March sunshine at three in the afternoon as the buses rumbled past the black iron railings, and here it was different, as we skated across the crests of the mountains below a reef of cloud, the land dark below us and the clock on the instrument panel flicking the minutes away to zero; here Flockhart hadn't the slightest control, and could only wait by the telephone for whatever Pringle might signal. My evaluation of this sortie hadn't changed: this was a suicide run.

'Nine minutes,' Khay told me, and took us down to three thousand feet as the mountains gave way to jungle. 'If there is any wind still blowing down there it will be from the west, and so I am going to turn now a little and approach the target from the east, so they will not hear us so soon.' With a shrug — 'It will make only a very slight difference, but we need all the advantage we can get.' His eyes studied my face. 'And how are you feeling, mon ami?'

'Everything's set up.'

I'd checked the camera three times on our way here, for something to do. It was a 1,000-frame Hartmann-Zeiss with a twenty-five degree omnidirectional sweeping capacity, and I'd set it at base maximum, which was where we'd start taking pictures.

'It is not what I mean,' Khay said, still with his eyes on me. 'I ask you how you are feeling.'

'Oh. Quite confident.'

That wasn't what he meant either but it was all he was going to get. The guards down there in the camp would start picking us up acoustically very soon now, and we'd be on a collision course governed by our airspeed and the time it took the Khmer Rouge to man their guns. So how would you feel, for God's sake?

Khay looked away and checked his instruments.

'Seven minutes.'

The moon was behind us now, and I thought I could see our shadow crossing the jungle below, but it must have been an illusion: at this altitude it would be too far ahead of us, nearing the camp, a ghostly harbinger.

'You have other children?' I asked Khay. 'Daughters?'

He turned his head. 'No.'

'Still have a wife?'

He looked away. 'She is missing. She is missing since fifteen years.'

I shifted in my seat, getting more control of the camera, pressing the button, shooting a few frames, watching the counter running, shutting down again.

'You have children?' I heard Khay asking.

'No.'

'Wife?'

'No.'

His eyes were on me again. 'You are lone wolf.'

'Not quite. Stray cat.'

He looked at his instruments again. 'Five minutes. Do you mind if I smoke?'

'Go ahead.' I hadn't expected him to have held out this long.

He lit up, using his blue Bic lighter.

Below us the jungle flowed in the night; we could tell it was there only by the faint sheen on the leaves cast by the moon. Occasionally there was a clearing, and I saw one with a dark line crossing it, some kind of track.

'Four minutes,' Khay said, and drew on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes in the smoke as he let it curl from his mouth; then he dropped the stub and put his boot on it. 'We will make our turn now, and go in from the east.'

The ocean of leaves swung beneath us, the horizon tilting, flattening out again as the compass spun and settled. At three minutes to zero Khay turned his head again. 'We will be moving into earshot quite soon now.'

I gave him a nod and shot another dozen frames, watched the counter, released the button.

'It is okay?'

'Perfect.'

'Two minutes.' He checked his bearings again and changed course by a degree, brought the Sikorsky back, dropped it a hundred feet, two hundred, until the heads of the palms showed up in clusters with a gap here and there where some of them had died off, their trunks leaning.

'We have one minute to go,' Khay said, raising his voice now, wanting to make sure I heard and understood.

'Roger.' I watched the jungle ahead. 'Give me thirty seconds, will you?'

He nodded, and I was aware of the environment suddenly, sharply aware as the senses became fine-tuned, aware of the vibration of the seat under me, of the floor under my feet, of the steady beat of the rotor and its deep and incessant throbbing, aware of the dry mouth and the adrenalin flush and the need to breathe slowly, keep still, keep patient as we settled again by fifty feet, settled again until the leaves were streaming below us, dark,rushing -

'Thirty seconds.'

I hit the button and swung the camera down a degree at a time as we moved into the target area, seeing gaps in the trees, a small lake, but nothing that looked like -

'Zero.'

Felt the slight vibration in the body of the Hartmann-Zeiss, swung it lower, lower again by another degree, keeping my eyes on the leaves below in case there were anything I could pick out, a truck, a half-track, huts, whatever was there, moving the camera to the base end of its travel and then up again as Khay banked the Sikorsky and brought it round in a tight turn and dropped and levelled out and began a second run in and a faint rattling began and I hunched into myself and concentrated on the camera as something hit the Sikorsky, nothing big yet, they needed time to roll out of their sleeping bags and lurch to the guns and swing them into the aim and fire, the Sikorsky lifting now, my knees pressing into the floor as a longer burst came this time, heavier, the flash of its detonation flickering among the leaves.

Khay jerked a look at my face. 'We go in again?'

'Yes.'

There wasn't any choice: with only a twenty-five degree angle on the camera there was no point in circling the target; all we'd get on film would be the camp's perimeter.

Medium turn this time at the end of the lift, then we dropped again and Khay brought the speed up and I tilted the Hartmann-Zeiss to maximum high and pressed the button and started bringing it down by degrees as we ran in and fetched a barrage and the cabin roof took on a glare and the fuselage felt the shock and Khay half-turned his head to listen and then dismissed it, concentrating on the controls as another barrage crackled from the trees and I released the button and looked at him.

'We cannot go in again,' he called above the noise. 'But I will turn and stand off for a moment in maybe a mile, for you to take more pictures. Do you agree?'

'Sure, let's do that.'

The jungle was booming behind us as they brought their tank guns into the barrage and I saw tracers reflected in the Perspex panel, then the horizon swung again with the moon curving across the darkness as Khay made his turn and vibration came in under the g-load and I started the camera running, the sky threaded with tracers now and the sound of the guns slapping at the cabin and the surface of the jungle down there boiling as the shells ripped through the leaves.

'We go now,' Khay called, then there was something else I couldn't catch because a shell hit the tail of the Sikorsky with a lot of noise and he was nursing the controls as we went into a slow horizontal spin and the horizon began tilting and vibration came in very badly now, shaking the whole cabin as Khay shifted the controls and shouted something in Khmer and I hit the flap on the camera and started taking out the cassette, but the cabin was shuddering now and we were losing height, the Sikorsky spinning faster all the time until the centrifugal force dragged me against the instrument panel and Khay's hands were wrenched away from the controls and his eyes made contact with mine just once as he was flung against the bulkhead with his boots flying up and we went into the trees with the rotor whipping and slashing, the sound volume exploding into a roar as the deceleration forces hurled me away from the instrument panel and across the cabin, saw Khay's face again for an instant as he was flung head-first between the seats towards the storage section, saw just his feet now, his boots, as the roaring blocked out all other sounds and I was aware of the final impact but couldn't analyze it, see or feel details, only knew that we'd crashed and that I was going under.