The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Read online

  McCue pulled him backwards over the logpile and laid him out in the shadows. He lifted his AK-47, checked that the magazine was fully loaded, and left his own M16 beside the body. Then he crouched for several moments, listening and watching. There was no indication from the tower that the guard there had seen or heard anything.

  Bent almost double, McCue took long, loping strides back into the shadow of the huts, and started to work his way round the edge of the compound to the west side where the second guard was posted. He was in his element, high on adrenalin, a born killer working in the dark as he always had in the tunnels. One on one. Always, until just seconds before the kill, he would be almost rigid with tension, and then in those last seconds every muscle relaxed and he felt warm and good, like that moment of letting go when you make love to a woman.

  He circled the stinking pile of refuse behind the guard hut, and drifted back into the shade of the trees, moving freely round to the west flank. But the guard was gone. McCue froze, then dropped to his haunches, searching for any sign of movement among the shadows. Nothing. Where had he gone? He heard a twig snap underfoot and turned to find the guard almost on top of him. The man had his rifle slung across his back and was preoccupied with retying the cord of his trousers. The thought flashed through McCue’s mind that all these guys seemed to do was piss. The guard did not see him until the last second, would almost certainly have walked into him if McCue had not risen from the ground like a black ghost. The Cambodian had no time to draw breath before McCue’s blade slid up through his rib cage. He fell forward, and McCue held him for a moment in an embrace of death, slowly withdrawing the knife before lowering him gently to the ground.

  McCue took a moment to steady himself. That had been too close for comfort. He wiped the blade clean and resheathed the knife. Through the trees he saw that the guard in the tower was still smoking. There was no way he could approach the tower unseen or, even if he could, climb to the platform unheard. He took a deep breath, and the tension seeped back into his muscles. He adjusted the scarf at his neck to hide the jungle camouflage beneath the black pyjama top, and walked out from the shade of the trees into the naked moonlight of the open compound.

  From their position among the trees above the commune, Elliot and Slattery saw a guard approach the tower. Elliot tensed. ‘Where’s McCue? Something must have gone wrong.’

  Slattery grinned. ‘Nothing wrong, chief. You’re looking at him.’

  Elliot looked hard at the figure crossing the compound. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, ‘that guy’s got balls.’

  ‘Time I moved,’ Slattery said. He hesitated. ‘Anything goes wrong, chief, it’s been nice knowing you.’

  ‘Just make sure nothing goes wrong, you ugly bastard.’

  Slattery grinned and slipped off through the trees. Elliot felt the seed of fear growing in his gut. But he knew that fear was not such a bad thing. It was when you stopped being afraid that you would die.

  From his platform high above the compound, the remaining guard saw McCue approach. ‘What’s up?’ he called. The figure below merely waved in response. The guard frowned. What was going on? He didn’t recognize the approaching guard. The face always seemed to be in shadow. The figure disappeared below the tower and he heard the creak of the ladder. He went to the open trap and watched the figure climb up towards him.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ He still couldn’t see the man’s face. Who was it?

  Almost at the top, McCue held up a hand for the guard to help him up. The guard obliged and found himself looking into a strange face that smiled in the dark. The questions that filled his head went unanswered, and death rattled briefly in his throat. McCue rolled him to one side and picked up the cigarette that had fallen from his mouth. It was still wet with the dead man’s saliva as he took a single draw and threw it over the side. He unslung his automatic and crossed to the rail that gave him a commanding view of the compound. A stalky, oddly familiar figure was strolling across the open ground towards the guard hut. It was Slattery, McCue realized, humming to himself as he walked, as if he was taking a casual stroll along Bondi Beach. McCue’s jaw slackened with disbelief as he recognized the soft strains of Waltzing Matilda. ‘Mad sonofabitch!’ he whispered.

  In the hut, four guards sat around a table playing cards by the light of an oil lamp. The others lay sleeping on bunks around the walls. One of the players lifted his head and frowned as he heard a tuneless voice softly humming a strange melody. They all looked up as the door opened and Slattery stood framed in the doorway, grinning.

  ‘Good day,’ he said and rolled two hand grenades into the centre of the hut. He slammed the door shut and took several steps back, hearing the clatter of panic inside before the grenades went off, blowing the door outwards. He felt the force of the blast, but stood his ground before swinging his M16 round and stepping back into the doorway. He emptied the magazine into the confusion of smoke and destruction in two sweeps of the room, quickly banged in another and waited for the smoke to clear. His eyes flickered over broken, bleeding bodies, making a quick professional assessment. All dead.

  He turned and ran back out into the compound as the door of the cadres’ hut flew open and a man, half naked and still half blind with sleep, staggered out. A burst of automatic fire from the tower cut him down, and Slattery heard the soft whistle of a mortar shell. He threw himself flat and heard the shell explode just behind the hut. The bugger’s missed, he thought. But he didn’t get up, still pressing himself flat in the dust and listening for the second shell. He heard shouts of fear and confusion from inside the hut, and there was another burst of fire from the tower. Come on, Elliot! He gritted his teeth and covered his head with his arms as the second shell whispered through the warm night and ploughed into the roof of the hut. The explosion sent large splinters of wood singing out across the compound.

  The dust hung in the air like silver mist in the moonlight. Slattery got slowly to his feet and looked around him, but could see very little. McCue shinned quickly down from the tower, collected his M16 and joined him.

  ‘Jeez,’ Slattery said. ‘It’s so quiet it’s eerie.’ He looked towards the civilian huts, but there was no sound, no sign of movement. ‘Where is everybody?’

  A tall figure walked towards them, through the settling dust, from the other side of the compound. Elliot looked grim. He dropped their backpacks at their feet and glanced round.

  ‘Sure we got the right place, chief?’

  *

  Serey had awoken from a shallow sleep with the first explosions of the hand grenades, and wondered if she had been dreaming. Then bursts of automatic fire had sent chills of fear through her. All the women in the hut were awake now, sitting up and staring with frightened eyes in the dark. She had felt Ny move at her side.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Then two huge explosions had rocked the whole commune. Their hut had shaken on its stilts. Ny held tight to her mother’s arm. Still no one in the hut moved, and a deep silence followed. Then the sound of voices from somewhere across the compound. Men’s voices. Strange voices, speaking in a strange tongue. There was a further silence, then a loud call. ‘Ang Serey.’ Ny’s fingers tightened around her arm and she thought it was the voice of death calling her. ‘Ang Ny,’ the voice called this time, and Ny’s eyes opened wide with fear. Mother and daughter clung to each other, too afraid to move.

  ‘Serey, Ny.’ The voice was insistent. ‘We have come to take you away. Come out.’

  Confusion penetrated the fear. Serey frowned. Now she recognized the words. The man was calling in English. A language she had not heard for four years, a language whose words she had never dared utter for fear of betraying a background that would have meant certain death.

  ‘It’s a trick, Mother,’ Ny whispered. ‘It must be a trick.’

  A murmur ran among the other women in the hut, their ey
es all on Serey and Ny. ‘Go,’ one of them said, ‘or they will kill us all.’ But still mother and daughter could not move.

  ‘Serey, your husband Yuon sent us.’ The voice again. And Serey knew for certain it must be a trick.

  ‘Go! In the name of Buddha, go!’ the woman hissed. The hands of other women pushed them towards the door.

  Ny took her mother’s hand. ‘We have no choice.’ They rose up and the others shrank away. Serey thought, if I am to die, I will die with dignity. But her heart wept for Ny.

  The men in the compound looked from hut to hut, searching for a response. Then the shrunken figures of Serey and Ny appeared at the door of one of them, and started down the ladder. When they reached the bottom they stood and looked at the three soldiers in amazement.

  ‘Jesus,’ Slattery said. ‘They’re little more than skeletons.’

  Elliot turned to McCue and pulled the chequered scarf away from his neck. ‘Get rid of those.’

  McCue obliged, slipping quickly out of the black pyjamas to reveal his jungle camouflage. Elliot walked over to the two women and was stunned by the appearance of the mother. Fleshless yellow skin stretched tightly across every bone, arms and legs flawed by open sores, grey hair thin and matted. A shrunken wreck of a human being. He was reminded of the photographs he had seen of pitiful souls in Belsen and Auschwitz. The girl looked fitter, stronger, a lustre in her hair. Perhaps youth had provided her with a resilience that her mother had lacked. And, yet, while Serey’s eyes seemed dead, Ny’s burned brightly with something he could not put a name to.

  He spoke softly to Serey.

  ‘My name is Elliot. I’ve been paid by Yuon to bring you out of Cambodia.’ He paused. ‘Do you understand me?’ She nodded, but the eyes were still dead. He looked at Ny. ‘And your daughter?’

  Ny said, ‘I understand.’

  Elliot was relieved. A language barrier would have made things difficult. ‘We must leave this place quickly. Our guns will have been heard for many kilometres. There will be soldiers here very soon.’

  He took Serey gently by the arm and led them across the compound to where McCue and Slattery stood watching. Both were kitted up, ready to go. They too were shocked by Serey’s appearance.

  ‘Do you know where your son is?’ Elliot asked her, and the first flicker of life appeared in her eyes.

  ‘He is in Phnom Penh,’ she said.

  Elliot cursed inwardly. ‘Then we can do nothing for him.’

  There was no emotion in her voice as she said, ‘I will not leave Cambodia without him.’

  Slattery nudged Elliot and nodded towards the huts. In the moonlight, men and women, young and old, were descending ladders, pathetic figures in ragged black pyjamas. Big dark eyes staring from shrunken heads, bones and joints stretching skin like crepe, blemished by sores and shrivelled by the sun. A hundred, perhaps more, pairs of feet shuffled through the dust of the compound towards them. Slattery felt the sting of tears in his eyes. These creatures were scarcely recognizable as human. ‘What the hell have they been doing to people in this country?’ His voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Elliot said.

  ‘I will not leave Cambodia without my son,’ Serey said again.

  Elliot strapped on his backpack. ‘We’ll discuss that when we’re safe.’

  ‘What about them?’ Slattery nodded towards the eyes that watched them with a dull curiosity and the faint light of hope.

  ‘Well, we can’t take them with us, can we?’ Elliot snapped. ‘They’re going to have to take their chances on their own.’

  ‘What chances?’ Slattery looked at him. ‘They have no chance, Jack.’

  McCue suddenly broke ranks and sprinted across the compound. A figure darted through the shadows of the huts, running for his life. McCue caught him before he reached the trees and brought him crashing to the ground. He pulled him, struggling in an armlock, back across the compound. He was a young man, full-faced and well-fed. He wore the black pyjamas and red-chequered kramar of the Khmer Rouge. His eyes were black with fear.

  Ny’s heart skipped a beat as she recognized the young cadre who had come for her every night all these months. ‘What do you want me to do with him?’ McCue asked Elliot.

  ‘Kill the bastard!’ Slattery said and drew out his pistol.

  ‘No!’ Ny stepped forward and stopped him. The young man’s knees almost buckled with relief. She was going to save him. Ny smiled a strange smile and drew Elliot’s knife from its sheath. A look of disbelief flashed across the face of the cadre as she drove it deep into his belly and, with both hands, pulled it up high under his rib cage. The scream choked in his throat as blood bubbled into his mouth, and he fell dead in the dust. Ny stood, pale and trembling, and the bloody knife fell from her hands. There was not a sound as the tears welled up and spilled from her mother’s eyes.

  And, then, one by one, the ragged creatures that had once been men and women stepped forward to spit on the body of the cadre until it ran with saliva that glowed almost luminescent in the moonlight, like the ghost of all their suffering. Elliot picked up his knife, cleaned and sheathed it. He had seen many men die, but rarely had he felt such a sense of shock. Not for the man who had died, but for this young girl, still little more than a child, whose hatred had robbed her of her innocence, corrupting her in a single act of cold-blooded killing. He thought, she could have been my daughter.

  ‘Elliot.’ He turned. McCue’s face was very pale. ‘We’re running out of time.’

  Elliot nodded. ‘Look after the old woman. I’ll take the girl. Slattery, get us out of here.’

  Serey glanced back over her shoulder as McCue led her away across the compound after Slattery. How many times she had dreamed of freedom, of escape. But now, with the eyes upon her of all those who had shared her misery and pain, she felt empty and sad, cheated of her moment. She wondered if any of them could ever escape from the memory. She saw the man called Elliot take Ny by the arm and lead her after them. And she turned away quickly. She had done everything she could to protect her, but it had never been enough, and now she was lost.

  ‘Stick close to me at all times,’ Elliot whispered to Ny. ‘Do everything I tell you, without question.’ If Ny heard, she gave no sign of it. He felt her trembling still, but she offered no resistance.

  As they reached the trees, Elliot became aware of a shuffling sound that whispered in the darkness and seemed to fill the air. He turned. A hundred pairs of leathery feet padding in the dust. The whole commune was following behind. As Elliot stopped, they stopped too, their eyes upon him. He felt uncomfortable under their gaze, and a sense of shame made him angry. ‘For God’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you people understand? We can’t take you with us!’ They stared back in silence. Slattery, McCue and Serey stopped at the sound of his voice. Elliot turned to Serey. ‘You tell them,’ he said. ‘Together we are dead. If each goes his own way then at least some of us will survive.’

  ‘Why should I tell them what they already know?’ she replied simply. ‘You gave them their freedom, so they will follow you.’

  Elliot’s eyes went cold. There was no time for this. Already there would be soldiers on their way to investigate the gunfire. He drew his pistol and levelled it at the crowd. ‘Then tell them that I will shoot anyone who follows us.’ And he raised his pistol a little and fired a single shot over their heads. There was an involuntary ducking, a shuffling of feet.

  ‘Hey, steady on, chief.’

  Elliot ignored Slattery. ‘Tell them,’ he said again to Serey, single-minded, insistent.

  She looked at him with contempt, then turned to the waiting eyes and spoke a few short sentences in a high, clear voice. And she, in turn, felt their contempt for her. She had betrayed them as surely as the Khmer Rouge had. She turned back to Elliot and spat in his face. ‘The Khmer Rouge shamed my daughter. Now you have sham
ed me.’

  Elliot wiped the spittle from his face with his sleeve and glanced at Slattery and McCue. There was no sympathy in their eyes. ‘Fucking move!’ he barked. McCue took Serey gently by the arm and led her away at a trot after Slattery. Elliot holstered his pistol and found Ny staring at him. He hesitated a moment under her gaze then, ‘You, too,’ he growled, and pushed her ahead of him to hurry after the others. As he glanced back through the trees, he saw the dozens of dark figures still standing on the edge of the compound, and knew he had just sentenced them to an almost certain death.

  They made slow progress through the forest. Serey and Ny were both weak, and the old woman had to stop and rest frequently, pale and breathless, a dry cough rattling in her throat. McCue gave them both water and a little food. He knew they would not be able to eat much. Stomachs shrunken by the paltry Khmer Rouge rations, conditioned to a daily intake of a few grains of rice, unable to cope with anything richer. It would be some time before they could eat a sustaining meal.

  They had stopped to rest for five minutes, squatting in the cover of a dry river bed. Slattery had gone ahead to scout out the lie of the land. Serey looked at Elliot. ‘Why?’ she said. He frowned, not understanding. ‘Why would you risk your lives to save us?’

  ‘Your husband is paying us well.’

  Her laugh was without humour, full of bitterness. ‘Does he think he can buy us, too?’ She looked at Ny. ‘Does he think he can buy back his daughter’s innocence?’ Ny lowered her head, unable to meet her mother’s eye. ‘What value does he put on our lives?’

  ‘He told me, everything he has,’ Elliot said.