Jake Fonko M.I.A. (14 page)

Traffic presented no problem, but the road did. Craters from bombs, artillery and mines made for slow going. Soh Soon knew Khmer Rouge mining tactics, and she showed me how to avoid finding any. We ran into a couple roadblocks, teenage boys in black pajamas who flagged us down, waving their rifles and asking questions. Soh Soon usually outranked them, but to keep things smooth she passed each batch a bit of our rice, the real reason why they’d stopped us. Our objective was the region northwest of Phnom Penh, around sixty miles by road. The first twenty miles took us over two hours, but then Soh Soon shunted me off the highway onto a secret road paralleling it that the Khmer Rouge had built with hand labor. It was dirt, but smooth and uncratered (and unmined!), so the next forty miles took only two hours more. By then I’d seen enough flat, deserted, desolate rice country. I stopped the car under some sugar palms along the boundary of a former rice field, and we ate our midday meal in the slatted, shifting shade. They all squatted, so I sat with back against a tree and legs stretched out straight in front of me—the traditional Albanian posture for eating lunch out-of-doors, of course.

Our rations didn’t take long to polish off. Afterward I donned my Albanian rice inspector helmet and made a show of testing the soil, inspecting the fields and scoping out the irrigation canals. Had I been a genuine rice advisor, I’d have resigned on the spot. As far as I could see with the field glasses we’d brought, the paddies were a shambles of mounds and craters overgrown with vines and weeds. No way in the world could unassisted hand labor put them into shape in time for the monsoon season, and the rains would turn it into one huge, reeking swamp.

Soh Soon had never been this deep into the rice country before, and the devastation nonplussed her. She knew the farmers had abandoned the villages, but she could conceive no explanation for the moonscape before us. Apparently, where she’d been operating our friendly carpet bombers hadn’t been frequent callers. In Nam I’d had a look at the destruction a flight of B-52s could wreak. Under ideal conditions three of them could take out everything in a box measuring two miles by one mile. These fields had met their share of B-52 squadrons. This must have been what the Brits and Frenchies had in mind about pointless bombing. Why the hell had our Strategic Air Command wiped out rice paddies on a wholesale basis?

After an hour of inspection and an hour of midday siesta, we hit the road for home. I noticed that our guard showed signs of relaxing a little. Back at base I snuck a peak at the gas tank to see how much we’d used. A lot. With no way to refill, we’d be cutting it close. Our breakout plan required another inspection tour up Highway 6, two days later. The escape route would take us down Highway 7 to the village of Snoul, the nearest point on the highway to her father’s place. We were looking at over 160 miles by surfaced road, and another 40 miles however we could make it, and we should allow for slow going. We doubted our two armed escorts would cotton kindly to any deviation from the authorized route, so we’d have to ditch them before we turned down Highway 7. Then I could retune the car and drive like a Californian. Also, Soh Soon assured me, once we got beyond the area the government had formerly controlled we’d have smoother sailing, as the Khmer Rouge had used the highway for supply and transport, and had kept it in decent repair.

The next day we presented our report to the inner circle. By that time I’d exhausted my repertoire of party songs—the logistics of the agricultural plan, whatever they were, alone took almost the entirety of “My Little Organ Grinder.” My fallback position was dirty limericks, of which I remembered a few. Soh Soon had me deliver a long statement in the beginning, my report on the inspection tour. I started off: “Hey dizgoostig hold ghermit named Dave kebpt ha dead proszh-do-doot hin hizsh cave…” I added “The man from Nantucket with a cock so long he could suck it” and a couple more, and after that a fresh limerick every now and then kept the lots-of-pens guys jabbering at full volume, so Soh Soon had to tap my Albanian wisdom only occasionally. Afterwards I asked her what she’d told them I reported from our field inspection.

“You report, no problem, big rice harvest next year on west side. People all work together and fix irrigation system out of love for Angka.”

“That’s impossible, and you know it,” I told her. “There’s no way they’re going to harvest any rice up there this year.”

“So?” she countered. “What happens us if I tell them truth? And what difference to the people if I don’t? Angka guys got no idea how people make rice, all they know is, people make rice. So if I tell them the people make big rice out of love for Angka, Angka happy, like our work, let us go on inspection trip. No matter what I say them, it still be bad for the people. Anyhow, so what? Not your country, and not mine.”

She had me there. “What about the next field inspection?” I asked her.

“I tell them, you say still must inspect on east side. Big rice from west side, but not big enough. So they okay us go tomorrow.”

I figured the time had come to tell her about my gear, still stowed in the shophouse. Particularly, I thought the water purifying tablets and several days’ field rations would come in handy. She saw the point to that and said we’d stop by for it on our way out. She also assured me she’d have the tank topped off. With the engine that badly out of tune, we’d need every drop of gas we could get.

I dispensed with bumbling the next morning, figuring my earlier stint would have qualified me, in the boys’ watchful eyes, for competence behind the wheel. Soh Soon directed me over to the shophouse where they’d found me. The downstairs shop stood more or less as I’d left it. The boys wanted to escort me in, but Soh Soon managed to bottle them up in the back seat, assuring them animatedly that it was a task unworthy of their very exalted status. As she harangued them, I hopped out of the driver’s seat and darted inside. I pulled my duffel out of its hidey-hole and hastily tossed things I thought we could do without. I scurried upstairs, retrieved my combat knife from under the bed-mat and strapped it to my calf. Plotting out strategy for the day, I’d had to confront the possibility of not having a weapon at ready when zero-hour struck. And I’d never tried to kill anybody with my bare hands before. You never know how well what they teach you in training works until you try it for real. To give myself one last, desperate advantage, I partially unwrapped a chocolate wafer “John Wayne” bar from one of the lurp meals. Then I hustled back down, toting my lightened pack out to the VW. When I stuffed my gear into the trunk up front I left the candy bar lying loose next to the duffel.

Gear secured, we took the north road out of town. After about twenty miles we turned east on Highway 6, heading toward Kompong Cham as per our scheduled inspection tour. Thirty or so miles further we’d turn south on Highway 7. We had to dump the two cadres before we reached that junction.

As on our previous tour, we tooled through dry and deserted rice fields that stretched to the heat-shimmering horizon, the geometric flatness broken by occasional stands of palm trees, and every now and then a winding, bamboo-studded stream. The further we went, the further the spacing between roadblocks. Wherever the Khmer Rouge had herded the population, we couldn’t spot them from the highway. About five miles, I reckoned, before the junction, we came upon a deserted village adjacent to some rice fields—a cluster of decomposing bamboo huts, a neglected pagoda, and some stands of sugar palms and coconut trees. Speaking in heavily accented English, I asked Soh Soon, with a jerk of my head in the direction of the rear seat, if the moment bode auspiciously for relieving our guard. Yes, she thought so. I pulled into the shade of the pagoda in the center of the village, and we piled out and trooped over to eyeball rice paddies. I fussed over the soil, paced off some paddy perimeters, pulled up some weeds and sniffed at their roots, and explored some irrigation canals. Actually, although badly neglected, these fields looked viable—were I to make a genuine report, I’d have recommended putting people to work out there. Even to someone as dense about rice growing as I, this area obviously had a shot at a decent crop. Too bad for the Cambodian peasants Angka would never allow it to happen.

My inspection killed enough time to bring us to the mid-day meal, our first food a meagre breakfast, and we started back to where I’d parked the car. Earlier we’d agreed to split the two boys, and each take one out. Midway between the edge of the village and the car, Soh Soon stopped the group and jabbered something. Then she and one of the boys headed back toward the rice fields. She and hers disappeared behind one of the far huts as I and mine reached the car.

The kid never took his eyes off me. If I tried to pull my knife out from under my pants leg I’d be riddled in my tracks, so Plan B was my only chance. I unlatched the trunk lid and opened it, the boy standing beside me. The aroma of that chocolate bar assaulted our noses. He homed in on it and turned to me with desperate yearning. I nodded and smiled, go ahead kid, it’s yours. When he bent to reach for it, I clouted him across the back of the neck, then grabbed him, rode him down to the ground and twisted his head until I felt the vertebrae part. Sort of a dirty trick, I suppose, but going barehanded against an experienced assassin toting an AK-47 isn’t exactly a sporting event. The kid knew his work well; his only serious error was to be starving hungry just then.

A moment later, Soh Soon arrived back at the car, alone. “That was quick,” I remarked. “How’d you get rid of him?”

“Usual way—knife in back,” she replied, matter-of-factly, showing me the combat knife she’d brought into the torture chamber that day. She wiped the bloodstained blade on the shirt of the cadre I’d just taken out.

“I zapped mine with a chocolate bar.” I countered.

She seemed impressed. “Kill man with chocolate bar? Maybe show me how sometime? Never can tell, might come in handy.”

Good thing she’s on 
my
 side, I reflected. I picked my guy up—he seemed feather-light—and stowed the body inside the nearest hut. Then I attacked the VW engine. We had no wrenches, a shame, as the sparkplugs cried out for re-gapping. Using the blade of my knife, I re-set the timing and adjusted the mixture and the throttle valve. It sounded a lot better, and I felt more sure of making the distance to Snoul on the rest of the tank. We tossed the rifles in back and took off, humming right along. We still had to dodge the occasional bomb crater, but what a relief not to have those KR thugs dogging my every move.

Past the deserted town of Kompong Cham we found a wooded spot by the roadside and stopped for a bite. Soh Soon was right, soon after that we passed into territory the Khmer Rouge had controlled, and the going got easier. That stretch had seen plenty of bombing, but they’d kept the macadam surface in passable repair. With no mines to worry about, we made pretty good time, averaging close to twenty per hour. Above the Fishhook sector of the Vietnam border, the road branched south. I’d weighed making a break for it across the border and down Highway 27 to Saigon, but I remembered what Emil Grotesqcu had said about the border being blocked. Even if Soh Soon talked us past the Khmer Rouge border guards, no way could we bluff the Viet Cong. Plus, if by some miracle we got past both sides, I’d estimated that we’d run out of gas dead in the middle of Indian Country. Her dad’s place was still our best bet, so we swung due east on Highway 7 and headed into the hills.

Luckily for us, the highway carried scant traffic. We passed Khmer Rouge roadside positions every now and then, but we identified ourselves as brothers-in-arms, and they waved us on by. We surely didn’t relish having to answer questions at roadblocks—our rice inspection yarn wouldn’t play too well out here in the rubber trees and jungle. Getting across some streams on the patched-up bones of destroyed bridges slowed us down, but we reached Snoul by late afternoon, about ten miles after I’d kicked on the auxiliary tank. A rubber plantation village of maybe a thousand or so, it boasted several blocks of assorted weather-beaten wood buildings with rusting corrugated roofs, interspersed with bamboo, thatched huts; a central market area; and scores more huts lining dirt tracks through the trees out back behind them. There would be a few manor houses for the plantation managers somewhere nearby, but we hadn’t any time for sightseeing. Like the other villages we’d seen along the way it looked empty, but I had the feeling people still lived there. I couldn’t blame them for staying out of sight. In their place, I’d sure have kept my distance from a car carrying a brace of Khmer Rouge officers.

Soh Soon directed me through town, past a roadside sod airstrip and onto a jungle track. Judging by the scars that still showed, U.S. bombers had hit this area pretty hard. A few years’ worth of monsoons had smoothed out the craters, and fresh vegetation had covered them over, but genuine triple-canopy jungle came only in sporadic patches. After a few miles more our wheels sputtered to a stop. She told me we had thirty miles left to cover. Well, the track made for easy hiking, and the hills enjoyed a slightly cooler climate than the flatlands (meaning that we sweated glassfuls, rather than buckets). I’d been afraid we’d have to move at night, which would slow us down. But we’d seen so few people that I figured daytime travel, with a little care, was probably safe enough.

I junked my Albanian coolie hat and put on my Chinese cap and checkered silk scarf—back to regulation uniform. We debated toting the AK-47s. We’d have to cover a lot of miles quickly and visibly: no time for stealth. So anybody who wanted to, could ambush us. If we got into a firefight, we were dead anyhow—they’d track us down and kill us with ease. The rifles were extra weight to slow us down, but who’d believe Khmer Rouge officers that traveled without them? We decided to carry one along for respect. I pulled the clip from the other, stuffed it in my pack and hurled the weapon down the road bank into the brush. The cadres had brought no extra ammo—two clips were plenty enough to discourage an escape attempt—and although the last thing I wanted was a shootout, if it came to that, I wanted to be prepared.