Children of the Uprising (19 page)

The first shots came before they even got off the boat. They hadn't expected that. At first they simply heard whistling noises and saw the rings in the water, as if it was beginning to rain. Then Sokhem got hit by a bullet and let out a scream before falling over the rail into the river. Sokhem had been sitting up at the front of the boat, hoping to be one of the first men off, hoping to be one of the first men to reach the Intelligence Center. He had dreamt of being a hero. He had dreamt of telling his grandchildren stories about his bravery, about how he led the charge that ended the War. The others had to jump over his floating body to get into the water and avoid the onslaught of bullets.

It was nearly one o'clock when they saw the first bullet hit the water. They were almost an hour and a half behind schedule. They hadn't expected to encounter any resistance until they were on the ground and approaching the Intelligence Center, but the people in the Intelligence Center were ready for them. Maybe it was because they were late. That would be better than the alternative—that there was a traitor among them. If they had a traitor among them, it would have all but guaranteed all of their deaths.

They were late because, despite the recent rains, the Sangker River was lower in spots than they'd expected. Twice, more than half of the twenty-three occupants of the boat had to jump into the water and swim beside the boat to keep it from running aground in the mud. Once, the men who'd jumped into the water had to pull the boat loose to get it moving again. It wasn't until they hit Tonle Sap Lake that the ride became easy. By then, they'd lost too much time to make up.

Sun Same had been the first man in the water when the boat hit the muddy bed of the Sangker River. The others laughed and cheered him on when he jumped in. Spirits were high. Sun Same worried that the others didn't realize what it might mean if they were late. Failure by any one of the groups could ruin everything. Sun Same didn't want Cambodia to fail. “Come on!” he shouted to the others. “We must free the boat! Jump with me!” Heng was the second man in the water. He left his gun on the bottom of the boat and jumped in. Tep followed him. Serey was the first of the nine women to jump into the water. Once she jumped, they kept coming until enough weight was off the boat for it to float again.

“Hurray for Sun, the hero!” Serey called out when the boat started drifting again. She flashed him a smile and he immediately forgave her for any intended sarcasm. Those in the water swam alongside the boat, lifting their feet to avoid kicking the mud as they swam. A group of boys, heading with a net to their favorite fishing spot, paddled past them. The youngest of the three boys, who could have been no more than five years old, pointed at the men and women swimming next to the boat and laughed. They were probably brothers—the three boys in their small boat. The boys had no way of knowing about the arsenal of weapons that the targets of their ridicule carried on their boat. They had no way of knowing that it was the weight of these weapons as much as the weight of the passengers that had caused the boat to run aground. If the boat had been carrying only the passengers, it would have cleared the muddy bottom with ease. It wasn't only the weight of the guns that got them stuck. It was the weight of the explosives too, explosives pieced together from new electronics and old land mines. The rebels knew how to account for the weight of the people. Nearly half of them had grown up on this river and the lake that it fed into. They were Cambodia's river people. Some of them had learned to swim before they learned to walk. Three of them had never been in a car before, only boats and scooters. Yet the War still found them and wouldn't let them go—not without a fight anyway.

Sun Same swam through the river next to the boat. Narith, the boat's captain, moved it slowly through the shallow water, knowing that a fast beaching could take hours to undo. Sun watched their surroundings as they floated by: the green leaves from the trees, the smaller boats of blue, red, and brown, the floating houses, the houses built on bamboo stilts. Every child that they passed waved to them. Every old man and woman brought their hands together in front of their chest as if to pray and bowed their head. Sun and Narith had promised Apsara, who was coordinating the Asian attacks, that the boat trip would take less than six hours. They believed that they were being conservative. The trip would take only four hours during the height of the rainy season. Now, though, six hours no longer seemed to be enough time. Sun wondered what would happen if they were late. He wondered what would happen if all of the attacks weren't exactly coordinated. Then he tried to stop thinking about it. Turning back was not an option. They had their guns and their bombs and their hope, and that had to be enough.

Heng swam up next to Sun. “You are worried?” Heng asked Sun as they swam side by side.

“We should have given ourselves more time,” Sun answered.

“No matter how much time you give yourself, old friend,” Heng told him, “it's not enough.” Heng and Sun had lived together in the monastery when they were boys. Heng had always been the wise one. Shortly after they turned eighteen, they found out that they were destined to be mortal enemies in a War that neither of them understood.

Sun thought about his friend's wisdom for a moment. “We should have given ourselves more time,” he repeated. Christopher's plan required coordination. It needed the chain to be unbroken. When the water became deep enough again, everyone got back into the boat and Narith gunned the engine.

After Sokhem was hit with a bullet, most of them jumped into the water with their guns. They swam toward the land, holding their guns over their heads to keep them from getting wet. Holding their guns above them made them even bigger targets. Heng was cut down in the water. They shot his body a second time as it floated there to make sure that he was dead. A few of the rebels stayed on the boat, knowing that they needed to get the boat, and its bombs, onto the land for the plan to have any chance of working. The problem was that access to the beach had been effectively cut off by the gunfire from the Intelligence Cell, and the men and women in the water were being picked off one by one. Luckily, as things were beginning to look their bleakest, the helicopter arrived. Sun had radioed for it only moments earlier, before he leapt into the water. When the helicopter came, it came with wind and fire. Its wind blew the leaves on the trees and created great ripples in the water on the lake. Then its fire: the helicopter's first missile hit the Intelligence Center with a crack and then its machine guns flared, providing enough cover for Sun and the others to pull the boat onto the shore.

They were already down eleven men by the time they got the explosives off the boat, but at least there was hope.

Reggie looked over at Christopher and saw that he seemed to have finally fallen asleep. They had adjacent aisle seats on the plane. The flight from JFK to Frankfurt was about eight hours, and then they would have another twelve-hour flight from Frankfurt to Singapore. Reggie hadn't known that Christopher had never been on a plane before. He did his best not to doubt his decision. He reminded himself that it had been Christopher's decision to fight, that he had given the boy every chance to run. Since Christopher had already decided to fight, Reggie was simply helping him to make sure that his fight wouldn't be wasted. That was what Reggie told himself anyway. He wasn't sure that Maria would agree.

“Why do you keep staring at me?” Christopher asked Reggie without opening his eyes.

“I thought you were asleep,” Reggie answered.

“I can barely sleep in a bed,” Christopher said. “How am I supposed to sleep in this chair?”

Reggie laughed. “When you get tired enough and bored enough, you'll sleep,” he told Christopher. “You should try anyway. You need the rest. We're going to be busy when we get to Singapore and we have a few things to discuss during our layover.”

“I was trying to sleep,” Christopher told Reggie, “but it's hard with you staring at me.”

“Point taken,” Reggie said and closed his own eyes.

No matter how hard he tried, Christopher couldn't manage to drift off to sleep. It wasn't the chair that kept him awake. It was his inability to get his mind to settle in the present. His mind kept moving forward and backward in time, leaping over the present like a dancer leaping across a stage. He tried to imagine what it was going to be like when they landed in Singapore, but the images in his head were an abstract blur. Reggie had tried to explain everything to him, but eventually Christopher merely pretended to understand so that he wouldn't look dumb. When his mind got too jumbled by the enigma that was his own future, it jumped back into the past. His eyes felt heavy and he thought about the conversation he and Reggie had had in the house on the Jersey Shore.

“So I know why it is that you want me,” Christopher had told Reggie when he got to the beach house. “I know that you guys think I'm the only person that everyone will trust since I'm the only person in this War without a side. But what's the plan? What chance do we really have of ending the War?”

Reggie still hadn't turned the lights on in the room. He and Christopher sat in the darkness. The boats still trolling the bay moved over the water like red and green fireflies. Reggie didn't want to turn the lights on. He didn't want to attract attention. He had thought that Christopher might ask him to turn the lights on, but Christopher never did. “There is a plan,” Reggie said to Christopher.

“I hope so,” Christopher answered. “I'd hate to think I abandoned my only two friends for nothing.”

Reggie paused. It would have been an easy opening to tell Christopher what had happened to Evan, but Reggie let it pass. “There's a reason why we need somebody that everyone will trust, and it's not because people from opposite sides of the War won't fight together or run together or work together. I don't know what Brian told you, but they will. Former rivals from the War have worked together in the Underground for generations. But no one has ever asked them to do what you're going to ask them to do.”

The darkness outside the window seemed to close in on them. Christopher could feel his heart beating in his chest. He wondered what request could be so horrible that it would strike fear in the hearts of paranoid killers. What could be worse than the violence he'd already seen? Christopher thought about letting it go for now, but he didn't have the stamina for confusion. “What exactly am I going to ask them to do?”

“What do you know about how the two sides of the War are structured?”

Christopher shook his head. “I don't understand your question.”

“Your mother must have said something in her journals about how the two sides of the War are structured. She must have said something about what she learned before she broke in to the Intelligence Cell in New York to find out where you were. What they did, breaking in to an intelligence cell like that and stealing information—people don't do that. She knew things. She must have written something about what she knew.”

“I remember something. She had a conversation with that Dorothy woman. I don't remember the details. All I remember is that they had to risk their lives to find a piece of paper with my address on it. None of the other details meant anything to me.”

Reggie pushed on. He wanted Christopher to find the answers on his own. He knew how much more powerful Christopher would be that way and how much more convincing. They were going to have to sell it as Christopher's plan anyway. That's the only way it would work. “That's not true, Christopher. Those details meant everything to you. You just didn't realize it at the time.”

“Why are you talking in riddles, Reggie? I didn't leave my friends for fucking riddles. I came here because I thought you could give me answers.”

“Do you remember in your mother's journal when Dorothy told her about the Intelligence Cells like the one that she and Michael raided?”

“Sure,” Christopher said. He looked up at Reggie. Reggie's green eyes nearly glowed in the darkness.

“Back then, each side had about fifteen Intelligence Cells. They have even more now because of what your mother and Michael did. They added redundancy. You guys took out one of the Intelligence Cells the other day. It's not easy, but far from impossible. That's where all the information is. That information is what tells each side who their friends are, who to kill, and who to hate.”

“So you're saying we did a good thing when we razed that building in the desert?”

“No,” Reggie told him. “You didn't do anything. All of the information in there is backed up in other Intelligence Cells. There's triple, maybe quadruple redundancy. All you guys were, in the big picture, was a minor nuisance. You were a gnat buzzing in their ear. They'll have that Intelligence Cell rebuilt somewhere else in a week. And there's something like fifty of those all over the world.”

“Okay,” Christopher said, confused as to where this was going. “So why are you telling me all of this?”

“Because the key isn't destroying the information.”

Christopher shook his head. When he read his parents' journals, he wasn't trying to solve the puzzle about how to end the War. He was trying to figure out who he was and why he was so afraid. Then a small spark came alive in Christopher's memory. “There were other buildings, right? There were these central hubs where everything was mapped and organized?”

A smile crossed Reggie's face. “Right,” Reggie said. “The information in the Intelligence Centers is the key to understanding how the information in the Intelligence Cells is organized. Without the information in the Intelligence Centers, the average person couldn't go into an Intelligence Cell and tell the difference between the paperwork of a friend and that of an enemy. A few of the old Historians might be able to piece together tiny bits of the big picture, but we're not too worried about them. The key isn't destroying the information—it's making sure that nobody can understand it. All this War is about is history. Take away the history, jumble it up into an incoherent mess, and nobody knows who to hate anymore.”

“So all we have to do is destroy the Intelligence Centers and the War falls apart?”

“That's the theory.”

“Didn't Dorothy tell my mother that the Intelligence Centers were basically impenetrable?”

“Yes.” Reggie nodded slowly.

“How many of them are there?” Christopher asked.

“Seven.”

“And you need me to go talk to people because—?”

“Because you're proof that people can survive without their history, that they can make their own history, that they are more than cogs in one side of a War.”

“I'm proof of all that?” Christopher asked.

“You're here, aren't you? That's proof enough for now.” Reggie left it at that, even though he knew that they would need more.

The plane hit an air pocket and ripped Christopher back into the present, lurching downward for what felt to him like at least fifty feet. His eyes shot open and he felt his stomach leap up to the top of his chest. He reached out and clutched the armrests of his seat. He looked around. The lights on the plane were out and everyone had the shades on their windows drawn. Most of the other passengers didn't budge, let alone wake up. Christopher tried to focus his mind on that moment. What the hell was he doing? This was silly. How were they supposed to end a War by destroying a bunch of pieces of paper?