White Crocodile

Tian was woken by a noise. A brief cry, like the sound her mother let out when she saw a rat between the huts at dusk. Silence followed, and she wondered if she had dreamed her mother’s voice. But sleep wouldn’t come, even when she tugged her sarong right up to her chin and closed her eyes.

She could picture Mummy sitting motionless on the top step with the empty look she got in her eyes sometimes, on those afternoons when Tian would call and call her and she wouldn’t hear. She pulled the sarong down again and sighed. Night was framed in the glassless square of window above her.

Jumping up, she pushed the cloth curtain aside and tiptoed across the hut. The doorway was empty. The moon slid from behind a cloud, lighting a bare sleeping roll.

No Mummy.

For a few seconds, Tian stood there mystified.

Mummy?

She turned and scanned the room. It was barely seven metres across and her eyes ran along the walls, searched every corner.

Outside the doorway, the night was black and full of the trill of cicadas.

‘
Meak?
’ Mummy. Just a whisper.

She took a step forward.

‘
Meak. Meak!
’

Tian hugged her arms around herself. Biting her lip, she began to walk towards the doorway.

On the top step she paused. It was colder outside than she had expected. A light wind rustled her sarong and brushed grey clouds across a sliver of moon. The rough wooden boards chilled the soles of her bare feet.

Her mother had warned her never to bother the neighbours. Even at six, Tian knew that she and her mother were not like the others. Bastard. She had heard the word and though she didn’t understand its meaning, she recognised the contempt.

But where else would Mummy be?

It was only twenty metres to the next hut, but there was no light. Tian glanced in the other direction. There was just enough moon for her to see the still edge of the jungle. Quickly, she dropped her gaze down to the five wooden steps between her and the ground. Something glistened on the bottom step. She bent down. It was a knife, its blade glassy in the moonlight. Recoiling, she sucked in a breath. She would run, as fast as she could. Ten seconds and she would be there, safe inside the neighbour’s hut with her mother. Then she noticed something else next to the knife, something carved into the wood of the bottom step, the gouges deep and uneven. She couldn’t quite see what it was at first. But it stirred a memory.

Instead of running as she had planned to, she sank into a crouch, wrapping her arms tight around her knees, feeling the chill on her bare shoulders. She remembered why she recognised the carving. The last time she had seen it, it had made the men of the village fall to their knees and pray.

The sign was a square of painted wood nailed to a post at the edge of the minefield, hanging crooked, as if it had been hurriedly tacked up. The stick figure of a reptile daubed on a black background. Needle-sharp teeth, a splash for an eye.

Tess realised that her hands were tattooing a rhythm against her thighs. Curling them into fists, she jammed them into her pockets. There was something written in Khmer beneath the drawing. She couldn’t read it. But she knew what the thing meant.

‘White Crocodile minefield.’ A Khmer in mine-clearance fatigues was standing watching her, his flat brown face expressionless. ‘You heard about the White Crocodile?’

Tess shook her head, and thought back six months to an English spring morning: trailing a hand along the sleek lines of a young man’s coffin.

‘No.’ She was surprised at how steady her voice was. ‘What’s the White Crocodile?’

The Khmer slotted some betel nut into his mouth, his saliva reddening as he chewed. ‘It come to Cambodia at time of important change. Present at birth of Cambodia. When Khmer Rouge took country, White Crocodile seen. This minefield.’ He gestured towards the red-and-white warning tape. ‘When this minefield found, White Crocodile here.’ He stared past her, out across the spoiled fields. ‘Seen here.’

‘So it represents fate, does it? Is that what people in Cambodia think?’

The mine clearer levelled his gaze at hers; he hadn’t understood.

‘Fate,’ she repeated. ‘Something that is meant to be. Something that you can’t change whatever you do.’

‘
Bhat
.’ Sudden understanding lent a gleam to his dark eyes. ‘Fate. The White Crocodile is fate.’

The call had come early one morning.

She had stayed up late the night before because it was a Friday, a precious evening before a weekend with no training, no exercises, the end of a gruelling week where her troop had spent four days in the field sleeping rough.

The phone woke her just before five, still almost dark outside, the white curtains beginning to turn grey-tinged pink. She fumbled for it, dragged from a dream that disappeared from memory the moment she woke, just the wisps of something warm and comfortable remaining. She was about to ask Luke if he knew what the
hell
the time was – let alone why he was calling her anyway – but when she pressed the receiver to her ear there was no static crackle, no pause while she waited for the words to lurch down the line from thirteen thousand miles away.

The memory of what happened next was as clear in her mind as if she’d received the same call every morning since.

‘Don’t listen.’ A voice cut in, a confident English voice, and a muscular arm folded around her shoulders. Johnny leaned into her, his breath hot on her cheek. ‘It’s just peasant bullshit.’

Tess twisted out of his grasp, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, meeting his gaze and catching his grin.

‘Jonathan Douglas Hugh Perrier – our resident toff!’ Bob MacSween, the MCT boss, had told her yesterday, taking her through the staff photographs tacked to the team-room wall. ‘Parents own a couple of thousand acres in Shropshire. My parents’ estate is a two up two down in the arse end of Glasgow. He’s a bit of a joker; comes with the posh-boy domain, I suppose. Never needed to take life seriously. Johnny swears he wires his house with trip wires, changes their position every few days just to keep himself on his toes.’

MacSween had laughed when he’d said it, but Tess had sensed a slight unease. Jokes and mines: it was dangerous territory. She lowered her hand to her cheek, smearing Johnny’s breath into her palm. His touch had felt too personal; she hardly knew him.

‘What’s bullshit? The Crocodile?’

‘It’s a Cambodian myth. A stupid five-hundred-year-old myth that’s got completely out of hand.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘They have crocodiles running around in their heads. The betel nut they all chew is hallucinogenic.’

‘Is that what the sign’s about?’ She tilted her head towards it.

‘I’ve no idea who put that up. I was going to come out here with a tin of paint and give it one less leg and a crutch, but MacSween would kick my arse if he found out. He’s into the locals and their idiosyncrasies.’ Smiling, he pulled a packet of tobacco from his pocket, rolled a cigarette and lit it. ‘Actually MacSween’s furious because he chose that fucking croc as our logo when he set the charity up five years ago.’ He pointed to one of the Land Cruisers where a sleek white reptilian insignia wound around the navy-blue letters, MCT, on its bonnet. ‘And now the villagers see it as their harbinger of doom. Not quite the image he was trying to create. Personally, I don’t care what the villagers think as long as my Khmer clearers don’t start believing that shit too and getting jumpy.’ He caught her eye and suddenly seemed to sense her anxiety. ‘You’re a bit edgy as well, aren’t you? Has something upset you?’

‘No. I’m fine. Just a bit spaced out by the time change.’ Her hand rose to finger her ear as she smiled up at him, a smile she hoped reached her eyes. ‘I should be going to bed about now.’

Johnny nodded, measuring her denial with a steady gaze.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said finally. ‘You’re only stuck with me for the week until you’re used to the foibles of the Cambodian fields, then you get your own troop.’ Taking a final drag of his roll-up, he dropped the butt and crushed it under his heel. ‘So let’s try and make it interesting for you. See what we can find.’

He looked past her. She followed his gaze, checking out the field as a mine clearer this time – a professional – trying not to look at the black sign with its crude drawing. Below them was a huge expanse of mined land that took in jungle, waterlogged paddy fields where rice once grew, cassava, maize and soybean fields, grazing land for cattle, dirt roads and pathways, and two deserted schools, the buildings derelict, windows blank. The land stretched five kilometres north to south, three east to west, linking a network of twelve small villages, each at starvation level, ravaged by the lack of safe land to farm.

It would take years to clear fully. Every centimetre – jungle, flooded paddy fields, footpaths, thigh-high elephant grass – had to be covered by a trained clearer, sweeping his detector from side to side across a metre-wide clearance lane, bending to investigate any alarms by hand, probing the earth with a steel wand to see if he could make contact with metal. When that happened, a hand would go up, and all the teams would have to pull back to safe ground while the clearer lay on his stomach and gingerly uncovered the suspected mine with his trowel and his fingers. If a land mine was found, it was marked with a red cone, the clearance lane closed for the rest of the day and the clearer taken to a different part of the field to continue work. At the end of the day, all the mines found were wired with explosives and detonated
in situ
.

It was early. Mist still clung in hollows. Johnny’s Khmer clearers, slight figures in pale blue MCT fatigues, were already working in their lanes, flak jackets and helmets on, visors down, eyes locked to the ground. Total concentration, and just the ambient hum of insects to mar the silence.

‘Tess.’ She felt Johnny’s hand on her arm. He had fastened his flak jacket. ‘I’m going to check something out in the field. One of my clearers has seen something in the lane next to his that he wants me to have a look at. Huan, the guy who’s clearing that lane, isn’t here today.’

‘What’s he seen?’

‘Nothing, probably. It’s usually nothing with these guys in this damn field. Are you happy to wait here and keep an eye on the rest of my teams?’

‘Yes, of course. But what is it? What’s he seen?’

Johnny had crouched down and was checking his detector, passing his hand around the metal coil to ease off the dirt, tracing his fingers up the shaft to the test button, which screeched a warning signal into the silence. She thought he hadn’t heard her.

‘Johnny, what’s—’

‘He thought it was a skull,’ he said, straightening.

A tight little laugh caught in her throat. ‘A skull? A human skull?’

‘That’s right. A human skull.’ Johnny grinned. ‘You’ve heard of the Khmer Rouge, haven’t you?’ His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

‘Of course I’ve heard of them—’ She broke off, aware that her own voice was rising, becoming shrill. He’d start wondering again – why she was so anxious – and that was the last thing she wanted to happen.

‘They killed millions. Marched their countrymen out to fields just like this, made them kneel and beat them to death with wooden clubs so they didn’t waste bullets.’ He pulled a face. ‘It’s probably just a fucking rock. So sit back and sunbathe and I’ll be back in a minute.’ Shouldering his detector, he turned towards the minefield. ‘Just don’t get burnt,’ he cast back over his shoulder. ‘I certainly don’t intend to.’