The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Page 23

  Nim threw himself backwards, instinctively, against the wall of the cabin and out of the line of fire from above. Fear and confusion tumbled together through his mind in a moment of blind panic. There were weapons below. He turned towards the hatch and literally ran on to Elliot’s blade, gasping in pain and surprise as the cold steel ruptured his spleen and slid upwards through his stomach towards his heart. Elliot’s cold blue eyes met his, and he knew in that moment that he would never see his home again.

  Elliot withdrew his knife and let the dead weight of the lifeless Khmer drop to the deck, a pool of dark red spreading quickly across the boards. He crossed to the rail and looked down into the boat below. The bodies of the two younger men lay in a grotesque embrace. Ny clutched her mother’s head to her breast, the older woman sobbing uncontrollably, McCue’s revolver lying at her feet where she had dropped it.

  ‘Elliot!’ There was an urgency in McCue’s voice.

  Elliot turned to find McCue standing with the machine gun trained on his chest. His face was tight and pale. The two men stared at each other for a long moment.

  ‘Get the women on board,’ Elliot said. ‘I’ll check out the rest of the boat.’ And he moved towards the hatch, and swung himself down the steps below deck and out of sight. McCue remained motionless for a few seconds longer, still rigid with unresolved tension, before pushing the machine gun aside and jumping down from the roof.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  In the deserted streets the clatter of the bicycle, flat tyres shredding rubber on cracked tarmac, echoed back from the long abandoned blocks of flats. Its rider, in tattered black trousers and ragged tunic, seemed unaware of the devastation around him. Metal security grilles, once drawn across shop doorways, hung smashed and rusting from broken hinges. The carcasses of cars and motorbikes and cyclo-pousses littered the streets and pavements like the rotting corpses of wild game killed for sport. In the heat and glare of midday, the shattered remains of Phnom Penh were silent and unmoving, like death itself. Only the distant and occasional rumble of heavy artillery stirred the silence, unheard or disregarded by the cyclist. The rider turned left, along a broad boulevard lined on either side by palm trees. Banknotes fluttered briefly along the gutter in the breeze of his passing. A torn teddy hung from the handlebars, spinning slowly, eyes as sightless as the boy’s.

  Hau’s AK-47 was slung across his back. His hands and face were sticky with the juices of the fruit on which he had earlier gorged himself – wild tropical fruits growing in profusion in the overgrown gardens of the villas near his home. He felt again the fierce cramps in his lower stomach, signalling yet another emptying of his aching bowels, and he began to sing to take his mind off the pain. A tuneless rendering of the Khmer Rouge national anthem. He did not think about the words he sang. They were a reflex action, almost instinctive, dinned into his impressionable young mind at countless compulsory national culture meetings at the commune.

  Bright red blood which covers our fields and plains,

  Of Kampuchea, our motherland!

  Sublime blood of workers and peasants,

  Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!

  The Blood changing into unrelenting hatred

  And resolute struggle,

  On April 17th, under the flag of the Revolution,

  Free from Slavery!

  The dark shadow of a vulture swooping overhead flashed across the road ahead of him. Its claws rattled on a corrugated iron roof as it landed on a building opposite, its beady black eyes watching with intense interest the figure on the bicycle below. But Hau didn’t notice it. His singing faltered as the cramps in his belly increased in intensity. He pulled up and climbed stiffly off the bike, letting it fall to the road in his haste to wrench down his trousers and squat in the gutter. A stream of foul brown liquid squirted from under him to splash into the dust. After a few moments the cramps subsided and he pulled his trousers up and picked up his bike. He felt weak, a little giddy, his mouth parched and dry, a hungry knot in his stomach. He remounted the bike and pushed off, the strain of regaining momentum taking its toll on the wasting muscles of his legs. For a while he tried to remember the song he had been singing, but it seemed strangely elusive, and he soon gave up to let his mind wander as aimlessly as his bike.

  He passed a dilapidated petrol station, its pumps long since torn away, the charred remains of vehicles behind the barbed wire of what had once been a second-hand car lot. A yellow SHELL sign still rose high on a pole above the smashed building, an oddly potent reminder that life here had once been very different.

  A pall of midday heat hung over Monivong Boulevard, very nearly tangible in its humid intensity. The dirty rag wrapped around Hau’s head, to keep the mat of tangled black hair out of his eyes, was sodden with sweat, and tiny rivulets of sweat ran through the grime that clung to his smooth round young face. He was finding it hard to breathe, and he stopped amidst the rubble on the pavement outside the towering Monorom Hotel. This time he leaned the bike against the wall and clambered over the splintered timbers and broken glass into the semi-darkness of the lobby. Shattered glass and the remnants of smashed furniture lay everywhere, a dusty cool in the air.

  He shuffled past the elevator to what had once been the reception desk and smacked his hands, palms down, on top of it, raising a thick white stour in the stillness, almost as if to summon the desk clerk with his room key. Only silence greeted him. He picked his way through the upturned tables and chairs in the main dining room, to where double swing doors leading to the kitchen had been torn from their hinges – doors that had swung back and forth countless times as the food prepared by Cambodian chefs had been carried out by Cambodian waiters to feed the voracious appetites of the Americans, and the French colons before them.

  The kitchen was largely intact, although the tiled floor was thick with broken crockery. Blackened pots and pans lay about where they had been pulled out of cupboards or torn from hooks. Two enormous refrigerators stood in the dark with their doors hanging open. Hau hurried across the kitchen with a quickening heart and the false hope that there might still be food in them. But they were empty, shelves ripped out, a cracked ice-tray lying on the floor. It was nearly five years since electricity had powered these icons of Western decadence, inducing them, improbably, to produce ice from water in tropical temperatures. In a fit of temper he kicked out at one of them, then thumped into it with his shoulder, rocking it back and forth till it crashed on to its side, rupturing the network of pipes at the back of it to release a trickle of milky white chemical on to the floor.

  The noise of the crash still reverberating in his ears, Hau turned away in disgust and stumbled over a small round metal object beneath his feet. He stooped to pick it up and found himself holding a tin little larger than a hand grenade, its label blackened by time and dust. He wiped it furiously on his sleeve then crossed to the door to examine it in the light. A faded blue-lettered Nestlé Milk was just discernible. The words themselves had no meaning for Hau, but there was something vaguely familiar about them, evoking a misty childhood memory of his mother’s kitchen and something sweet. With a rising excitement, he realized that it was food, and he turned the tin round and round in his hands, staring with sparkling eyes. He ran his tongue across parched lips and squatted on the floor, drawing his knife from his belt. He stood the tin in front of him, took the knife in both hands and drove it several times into the lid, causing a thick white substance to ooze from the punctures. He collected a little on the tip of a finger and raised it tentatively to his tongue. The sweet taste almost burned his mouth, and in an instant he had snatched the tin from the floor and lifted it to eager lips that sucked fiercely at the cloying sweetness. When the tin would yield no more, he placed it once again on the floor and stabbed at it repeatedly with his knife until he could force the jagged lid out and dip fingers inside. Again and again he ran them around the inside of the tin and sucked at them hung
rily until he had cleaned out every last drop. Then he threw the tin away and turned back into the kitchen, eyes probing each dark corner in search of more.

  For half an hour he tore the kitchen apart, ripping units from the wall, searching on hands and knees among the debris on the floor, before slumping, unrewarded and sweating, against an upturned table in the centre of the room.

  He sat in the semi-darkness for a long time until his breathing and his disappointment had subsided, and he realized that he was thirstier than ever. But now he felt weak again too, the sweet taste of the Nestlé milk already a distant memory, almost as though he had dreamt it. He closed his eyes and felt himself swimming backwards through space. Faces ballooned at him through the darkness and he saw his own hands reaching out to pull plastic bags tight over their heads, holding them in place, ignoring the frantic fight for breath that came from within. Hands reached out towards him like claws, fingers grotesquely curled in a last desperate attempt to hold on to life. He felt them tug at his trousers, at his tunic and, finally, at his face, sharp nails drawing blood.

  He awoke with a yell and felt scurries of movement all around him. His cheek still hurt where the nails of the hand in his dream had scratched him. When he put his hand to his face he drew back bloodied fingers. The floor had come alive and seemed to be moving beneath him. He drew in his knees and found himself staring into hundreds of tiny black eyes, twinkling with pinpoints of light. For a moment he thought he must still be asleep before he realized that the floor around him was indeed alive – with rats. He heard himself scream as he leapt to his feet, swinging the Kalashnikov from his back and firing wildly at the floor around him, raising clouds of choking dust and sending splinters of tile and crockery spanging off in all directions. The rodents scattered in a squealing panic, several exploding in a bloody mush, caught in the spray of bullets as they fled.

  Hau stopped screaming as he stopped firing and found himself breathless and shaking uncontrollably. He didn’t wait to count the rats he had killed, but turned and ran from the kitchen, through the dining room, crashing into tables and chairs as he went, oblivious of the pain. Into the gloom of the lobby, back past the elevator to stumble over the rubble in the doorway and out on to the street, where the heat and glare of the afternoon sun hit him like a wall. He screwed his smarting eyes against the light and snatched his bike from the wall, mounting it and pedalling blindly away along the boulevard.

  When, finally, Hau became aware that his progress had slowed almost to a halt, he had no idea where he was. He had pedalled furiously through a dozen or more deserted streets, unseeing, uncaring, driven only by the desperate desire to escape the nightmare presence of the rats that had crawled over his sleeping body to tear at his face in the dark empty kitchen of the Monorom Hotel. He swung his leg over the saddle and staggered to a halt, the hot pavement burning the leathery soles of his feet. His fitful gasps for air seemed to scorch his lungs.

  He glanced around at the crumbling buildings with all their broken windows, the trees and bushes that grew in thick profusion in deserted yards. And his eyes came to rest, across the street, on the high walls and open gates of the deserted Phnom Penh High School. Beyond the walls, and the desolation of the empty playground, stood three plain buildings built in the early Sixties by the Sihanouk government to serve as one of the city’s principal high schools. Hau could not, at first, identify what it was about these buildings that seemed odd, until he became aware that all their windows were intact. But more than that, a dreadful silence seemed to emanate from the very heart of the school, smothering all sound around it. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. There was no birdsong. A pall of something you could almost touch seemed to hang over it, drawing Hau’s curiosity, yet at the same time provoking a dread that he could not identify.

  He leaned his bike against a tree and very slowly crossed the road, watching keenly for any sign of movement. As he passed through the gates and beyond the walls he stopped, suddenly, and listened. What had seemed like silence was developing into a deep, distant hum, a vibration like the sound of a motor or a high-tension electricity pylon. Although ever-present, it was not a constant sound, but rose and fell in unusual cadences. And as Hau neared the main entrance, the intensity, though still muted, increased. It had a disquieting effect, and for a moment Hau hesitated, and considered turning back. But something compelled him on, to push open the door and step inside.

  The stench of decay closed around him, sickly sweet, almost overpowering in the heat, and his ears filled with a buzzing that roared in the stillness. The air was black with flies. Engulfing, smothering clouds of them. He struck out blindly as if he could somehow fend them off, and quickly ripped the cloth from around his head and clamped it to his nose and mouth. The door he had entered by swung shut behind him, and in his panic he stumbled towards the light shining through another to his left. He found himself in a long corridor divided into cubicles by crude brick partitions. Sunlight slanted through the windows all along one side, almost obscured by the flies. His entrance seemed to infuriate them, their rage redoubled to a pitch that was almost unbearable.

  The air was virtually unbreathable, and Hau choked behind the filthy rag he clutched to his face. His only thought was to get out. But the heat, his fever, the gnawing in his gut, combined with the stink and the flies, had a disorientating effect. Afraid to go back, uncertain now of which way he’d come in, he stretched out a hand to support himself against a brick partition and staggered forward to reach an opening. Turning into the cubicle, he tripped over a petrol can, falling and spilling an acrid yellow liquid across the floor beside him. Bile rose in his throat as he reached up to grasp the skeleton metal frame of a bed without a mattress, and found himself staring into eyes that gaped back at him from a half-decayed face – a face that seemed almost animated by the flies that crawled over its putrid flesh. The nose had gone. Black and broken teeth protruded from a mouth that gaped in a hideous grimace. Hau screamed in terror and fell back against the wall. The corpse was tied to the bed frame, hideously mutilated, still straining against the agony of a death that had not come soon enough. An empty chair sat by the side of the bed, and beyond it a blackboard still bore a bizarre list of instructions:

  You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

  During the bastinado or the electrisization you must not cry loudly.

  Don’t be a fool, for you are a person who dares to thwart the revolution.

  If you disobey any point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of the whip or five shocks of electric discharge.

  The walls were plastered with grotesque black and white photographs of hundreds of dreadfully tortured faces and mutilated bodies.

  Hau was shaking uncontrollably now, and he heard his screams like some disembodied sound from another world. He slithered across the fly-infested urine he had spilled on the floor, and ran down the corridor. More faces leered at him from every opening; twisted fingers, their bones poking through fetid flesh, grasped at him from beyond the grave, as they had done in his dream. Only this was no dream. Through a door to a classroom, all light nearly obliterated by the flies, Hau stumbled and fell. Stinking corpses piled up in the dark clasped him to their bosoms, a nightmare of arms and legs whose rotted flesh fell away in his hands. Accusing eyes stared in the gloom, open mouths breathing death in his face. Somehow, for he no longer acted with any will, he pulled free of their embrace and tumbled back through the door and along the corridor, flies in his ears and nose and mouth, tears blinding him. Through another door, and another, until suddenly he collapsed down a short flight of steps into bright afternoon sunshine and lay retching in the yard.

  Still crawling with flies, he tore away his ragged calico tunic and trousers and ran naked across the yard, out through the gates and across the street. He grasped his bike, still racked by the sobs that tore themselves painfully from his chest, and ran pushing it up the street, al
most unaware of his nakedness, certainly unashamed by it. For he knew now that there could be nobody left alive in this world but him.

  *

  The speeding black American saloon car wove its way through the debris-littered streets; the charred, rusted remains of civilian and military vehicles, the belongings of a lost population dragged out on to the street and left to the ravages of time. Its driver wore a kramar over his black tunic and trousers, but his three passengers were incongruous in their dark Western suits: two expressionless Chinese and a small, ageing Cambodian with a sad round face and deeply ringed dark eyes.

  Sticky and uncomfortable in the airless heat of the car, they were jolted again and again by wide cracks and potholes in the road. The Cambodian gazed out at the ruins of his city. The desolation of what he saw was reflected in his heart. Pol Pot and the others had left ahead of him, no doubt in futile resistance to the invader, but still the Chinese adhered to their ally, insisted on providing his safe passage out of the country. He was after all, as the legitimate ruler of his beloved Cambodia, their last vestige of international credibility, as he had been since the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. He himself had been powerless, clinging despondently to the hope that the madness must end sometime, and that he could play a part in the rebuilding. But now he knew that for him it was over.

  His thoughts drifted back to the past, how it had all once been – in his mind an enchanted, happy time; court dancers performing to the music he himself had written, extravagant royal banquets, the gatherings of joyous, colourful crowds on the river to witness the Fêtes des Eaux. And he frowned as he recalled the tide of events, his attempts to keep his country out of the war that raged between America and Vietnam. And then the bombs and the coup, conspiracy and betrayal feeding the cause of the Khmer Rouge. And finally the murder of his people, and now his own enforced exile. He wondered what the future could possibly hold for him.