Blood Is a Stranger (40 page)

Cardinal crept along the road from the truck. It had been hidden in a village at a fork in the road. One trail led to Adum's home at camp site 2, and the other to camp site 8, and the refugee base of the Khmer Rouge, where the people from DGSE – the French counter-espionage service – would be heading, according to Webb's sources in Bangkok. Cardinal crouched beside Webb, who flung
the binoculars at him.

‘Make yourself useful,' Webb snapped. ‘The Frogs will be in a brown jeep. If you see it, or any firing, yell! I'm going to have a crap!'

‘I wish you would tell me what you have planned,' Cardinal said. Webb stopped in his tracks holding a roll of toilet paper.

‘I told you, leave it to me,' he said through gritted teeth. ‘I know what I'm doing.'

‘Do you have to murder them?'

‘Who said I was? Christ, you give me the shits! Literally!' He stormed off to a canal.

Cardinal scanned the road, focusing as far as he could. Then he let his eyes rove over the countryside. There was the odd bullock already being put to work, and the area looked as tranquil as it had the previous evening. He had not heard anything apart from distant muffled gunfire during the night, which had hardly stirred him from five hours slumber. He spotted conical straw hats in the fields to his left. They were still and looked like they belonged to scarecrows. He kept the focus on them and blinked to make sure his eyes were not deceiving him. They began moving through the grass about forty metres from the road. Movement on the other side distracted him too. He looked along the road and could see the object of the excitement. A high-sided vehicle was moving their way.

Cardinal glanced around for Webb and called out for him. There was no reply. Cardinal returned his gaze to the oncoming vehicle. Through the early morning heat haze he could make out the colour. It was the jeep. The binoculars picked out the faces of two men in the front. Two others were in the backseat. Those in front wore smart hats and the one in the driver's seat had his face against the window as if he were alseep. Cardinal turned again to shout for Webb, but he was a few metres behind him, creeping low and waving his hand to an unseen figure between them and the road.

‘Keep your head right down!' Webb said. ‘The little brown Frogmobile has arrived!' He was positioning himself, the rifle ready for firing. Cardinal watched the newcomers and felt the tension tighten. They were slowing down. The driver was leaning forward, his hands close together on the top of the steering wheel, as he peered into the distance. A long sixty seconds later there was an explosion and a puff of smoke from the jeep. Cardinal's immediate thought was that it had back-fired. But it was pitched sideways, almost in slow-motion, and the full impact of the sound reverberated down the road. There was a hole in the side of the truck.

‘What the hell hit them?' Cardinal said.

‘One hundred and thirty millimetre cannon,' Webb said, ‘that's what!' He jumped to his feet and ran along the grass.

Several figures were moving towards the van. Cardinal stood up. He could see one, two, and then a third man struggling from the crippled jeep. They were surrounded. One man fell to his knees and fired a hand-gun but was flattened by return blasts from six rifles. The remaining two froze and cringed close to the jeep, their arms held high in surrender. One dropped a hand and appeared to be grabbing at a rifle on the ground. Webb and other gunmen opened up and both men crumpled where they stood.

Cardinal rushed to the jeep. Webb ordered the three bodies stripped and hurled into the jeep's hole next to the fourth man, who had been blown apart by the impact. Ten Kampucheans struggled to right the vehicle. It would not budge. Webb told Adum to incinerate it.

‘Now don't say a bloody thing to me!' Webb said to Cardinal, his voice choked and furious. ‘If those idiots had not had a little fun in Bangkok last night they would not be dead! They were late!'

Cardinal could not speak.

‘Just keep one thing in your skull,' Webb said, calming
his voice a notch as they trotted towards the truck, ‘if we don't impersonate those guys there is no way you'll ever know about your son. It had to be done, mate, and that's that!'

The computer terminal screen was filled with Webb's profile. Hewson ran his hand over the keyboard with the deftness of a concert pianist.

‘Afraid I can't let you see this,' he said sliding the face of the small screen away from Rhonda. ‘In fact, I'm not allowed access to classified material outside the office. Just about all of us use home computers these days, so the rules are bent.'

‘Well,' Rhonda said, pen poised over a notebook, ‘what can you tell me/'

‘It's difficult,' Hewson said. His eyebrows rose above the rim of his glasses.

‘No machine is going to say, “Here is what you don't know.” You've got to give it clues, angles, points of association.'

‘All right,' Rhonda said, ‘I want your smartarse computer to tell me if he has worked for the French or American Intelligence.'

‘Fine,' Hewson said staring at the green type on the screen. ‘We have to ask it for American Affiliations.' He typed in USA-Aff and waited. Seconds later the screen asked: ‘Business, political, sporting, cultural, other . . . ALL?' Hewson asked for ALL. The machine purred, then typed up the response:

WEBB,
P.O.

MILITARY:
With special CIA forces, Cambodia, Vietnam, 1966-1969. Action: field patrols. For specifics see CIA file Gluclu 34621. H/T.

BUSINESS: Special operative, silent director, Nugan Hand
Bank. Business Consultant Hong Kong, Jakarta.

Hewson repeated what was on the screen.

‘Can we get that CIA reference file?' she asked.

‘Not without the ASIO director's authority,' Hewson said. They waited in silence until a laser printer provided the detail. Rhonda watched him pocket the page. She asked what he intended to do with it.

‘You've got me interested in this guy now,' he said. ‘Would be nice to know more about him.'

‘Could you check on the French link?'

Hewson made the identical request, and the computer made its search. It replied:

POLITICAL: 1979:
Visit Paris on assignment to report on remnants/splintering/power Khmer Rouge. Report avail-able ASIO Canberra. Speaks passable French. Reads French.

Rhonda was ecstatic. Hewson tempered her reaction.

‘I can get that assignment,' he said, ‘and I'll bet it's a nothing report. Sounds like he got a little junket for a couple of months in Paris gathering a few facts on the regrouping of Khmer Rouge after they were thrown out of power by the Vietnamese.'

‘Okay,' Rhonda said, ‘it may not thrill you, but look at the link. He has been in Kampuchea and must have known of the Khmer Rouge as far back as the mid-sixties when they were an extreme left-wing group in the forests and mountains. Then there is this so-called field patrol stuff he was hooked into with the CIA. What is that all about?'

‘I would have to check the CIA file,' Hewson said. He ran his teeth over his bottom lip. ‘But I can tell you one thing. Field patrol has always been a euphemistic code with us to mean “search and destroy”.'

‘Which means?'

Hewson flicked off the computer as if someone at the other end might be listening.

‘That meant political assassination.'

The truck passed through the town of Aranyaprathet, where the road from Bangkok to Phnom Penh ran into a wall of olive green concrete-filled bags. Cardinal and Webb were riding up front with Adum who was driving. They could hear persistent gunfire a kilometre away around the bridge between Thailand and Kampuchea.

‘Man, it's thick with Khmer Rouge out there,' Adum explained. ‘The Vietnamese attack them all the time.'

Thai soldiers, Ml6s by their sides and grenades swinging from khaki belts, were in the town's concrete shops and standing outside the dung-coloured timbered houses. Aranyaprathet seemed inadequate to cope with the number of foreign-aid agencies concentrated around it.

Webb kept glancing at his lap where there was a manila folder with a file taken from the belongings of the French Intelligence officers. He appeared calm.

By contrast, Cardinal was uneasy. He thought over the plan Webb had divulged to him over the past six hours. Cardinal was to be one of the Frenchmen, and they had been speaking French all day in preparation for meeting the Khmer Rouge contacts. He anticipated being taken into the Cardomom Mountains to the Pol Pot stronghold.

‘How did you know I spoke French?' Cardinal asked Webb, as they caught the first distant view of site 8.

‘You told me you made art transactions in Paris,' Webb said. He didn't look up from the notes in front of him.

‘Anyone dealing with hard-nosed Parisian bastards would have to know their language.'

It was true, Cardinal thought but he had only vague recollections of discussing it with Webb. They slushed by other Khmer refugee sites. Despite the poverty they were bustling and noisy and the children's laughter brightened
the atmosphere. But as the truck approached site 8, Cardinal experienced other feelings and reactions altogether. The place was still. Cardinal could not help remarking on this and the eerie silence.

‘That's because it's a military camp, man,' Adum said. There was a hint of a tremor in his high-pitched voice. ‘There is where the Khmer Rouge recuperate from the fighting.'

No one smiled. Hard-faced young men, many of them leaning on crutches, stood in front of open doorways and watched as the truck slid and splashed its way along the muddy tracks. Cardinal thought their stares suspicious.

The four year Pol Pot regime had left its mark on the faces, Cardinal noted. The Khmer Rouge children, born of the robotic counter-culture, had a sad appearance.

Adum pulled up at the entrance to the biggest hut in the site and sat nervously at the wheel. Cardinal and Webb climbed out carrying briefcases and one suitcase. A Kampuchean in his mid-thirties came out to meet them. He was small with broad features and short-cropped, dark hair. He wore the trademark red-and-white scarf and black pyjama pants of the Khmer Rouge. The man introduced himself as Dunong in faltering French and ushered them into the hut where a dozen other similarly clad men were sitting on the floor or stools.

Webb eased the tension by shaking hands with a few of them and saying some fumbling words in Khmer, which brought grunts of appreciation. Webb squatted in the center of the earthern floor and snapped open the suitcase. All the men crowded around to see the bundles of crisp looking American one hundred dollar bills. Webb tossed them flamboyantly to Dunong, and with his nod of approval, some of the others. They began to count the bundles. Webb accepted a cup of ubiquitous Khmer tea. Cardinal was shown a nearby hut where he and Adum took all their luggage. A few minutes later Webb joined Cardinal and seemed excited.

‘Let's go for a walk,' he said. ‘As an off-handed observation, there are a surprising number of amputees about, wouldn't you say?'

Cardinal shook his head ruefully.

‘There's an industrious guy in here who's doing a roaring trade in prostheses.'

‘What's made you so happy,' Cardinal asked, ‘in your own cute way?'

‘I'm not kidding!' Webb smirked. ‘The guy lost a leg and made an artificial limb for himself. Adum says he has made more than a thousand since.' He stopped to pick up a flat stone and skim it along the canal. ‘You see, even in the heart of this worst of all commie camps, free enterprise flourishes. Gives you hope, doesn't it?'

‘Dunong and company certainly liked the money you laid out in front of them,' Cardinal said aridly. ‘Perhaps they're all capitalists at heart.'

Webb laughed. ‘There was only half a million there. Chicken feed! Trust the Frogs to try it on the cheap. They think they can buy the design for the most powerful technology on the planet for zilch!'

Cardinal noted Webb's hitherto unexpressed expertise.