Quiller Salamander

by Adam Hall

  'All new here,' Jimmy said, blushing, 'all new vehicles, cost me lot of money to buy them, what you looking for?'

  'We're looking for a jeep, Jimmy, four-wheel-drive, new tyres - what about that one?'

  'If it's in good shape,' I said. It had camouflage paintwork and the springs looked even and the headlamps still had glass in them but that didn't tell us anything about the big ends or the rocker arms.

  'Start her up, Jimmy,' Tucker said, and we listened to the engine and I rocked the front wheel bearings and bumped the shocks and looked under the crankcase for leaks.

  'I'll take it,' I said.

  'Okay, Jimmy, the gent's going to take it, so I'll tell you –'

  'Hundred thousand riel,' Jimmy said, flashing gold, 'for day.'

  'So I'll tell you what we'll do,' Tucker said. 'We'll give you fifty thousand for the first two days in cash right now and we'll make it twenty thousand a day after that, start with a tankful and that tidy little dent in the rear wing, and if –'

  'Hundred thousand,' Jimmy said, flashing his gold assets, 'for day.'

  'And if you can't meet those terms,' Tucker told him pleasantly, 'I'm going to bring in the drug enforcement guys and they'll go through this place with sniffer dogs and you'll spend the rest of your life in the torture cells in Phumi Prison and you'll wish to Christ you'd said yes to our handsome offer of fifty the first two days and twenty thereafter, you want me to repeat that do you, Jimmy?'

  I paid in cash.

  There were two canvas water-bags slung outboard on the jeep but I drove round to the front of the airfield terminal and picked up half a dozen sealed plastic bottles of Evian water from the concession and stowed them behind the driver's seat. I didn't know where I'd be going today, or how far, and at noon the sky would be a hot brass dome across the city and the plains.

  By nine o'clock the sun was already over the mountains south-east by east of the town, and the heat waves were spilling molten silver across the airfield. In the distance the sugar palms leaned along the horizon like a broken palisade, and I saw egrets on the wing, black against the blinding sky.

  There was no shade for the jeep that wouldn't block out my view of the landing strip and the tower on one side, the freight sheds and the hangars on the other. But the canvas top was up and I had my sunglasses on against the glare. The runway slanted across my vision field, broken away at the edges and streaked with black rubber, and I saw a rat as big as a pig darting across it, God knows whence or on what errand.

  I began watching the sky to the south.

  Chapter 10

  LEOPARD

  It was an hour before a black splinter floated into the glare above the horizon, the sun flashing on it as it began turning into its descent, becoming an aircraft, drifting on its flight path above the foothills to the south-west with its strobe sparking in the saffron haze as the landing gear came down and its profile tilted as it settled towards the runway, a Czechoslovakian-built L 410 Turbolet flying the Trans-Kampuchean insignia at the tail.

  It was a passenger plane, so I started the jeep and moved round the perimeter track to the terminal building and parked near the bus station and walked across to the arrivals wing, finding adequate cover on the far side and well clear of the car rental desks and the newsstand and the baggage console and the toilets.

  Fourteen passengers came through, one of them Pringle, none of them Colonel Choen. I had never seen Choen, but I would know him when I did.

  Pringle wasn't looking around for me, wouldn't expect me to be here, wouldn't expect me to approach him even if I were.

  I went back to the jeep and took up station again halfway between the terminal building and the freight sheds.

  The rising heat shimmered like a lake across the runway, and I sat with my eyes closed now behind the sunglasses to protect the retinae from the glare, checking the south horizon at intervals through the slits of my lids.

  Eleven-ten, but this one wasn't coming in: it was a Beriev Tchaika amphibian, lowering across the east towards the Tonle Sap.

  Noon minus twelve and a Skyvan 3M came rumbling out of the south like an elephant, and I started the jeep again and moved towards the freight sheds and was there when the crew came off, three Caucasians, one of them limping, all of them lighting cigarettes as they walked across to the office.

  At noon I opened the first bottle of Evian and drank half, holding it like a trumpet and seeing beyond it the helicopter moving in from the south, lower than the other aircraft had been, tracing its path across the mountains to the south-east now and turning, making its approach, fifteen degrees high. I put the cap back on the bottle and stowed it with the others, not taking my eyes off the chopper, noting the camouflage paint, the absence of any insignia, simply the identification letters, F-KYP, the strobe flashing, the fronds of the sugar palms waving under the downdraught from the twin rotors, a Kamov KA-26, touching down within fifty yards of the freight sheds as I started up again and found cover between a hangar and the loading dock as a camouflaged staff car with the fabric top raised came in from the perimeter road and pulled up, two men in battle fatigues dropping to the ground and going towards the helicopter as the rotors slowed and the cabin door came open.

  I could hear his voice already, barking an order to the pilot, and his walk was as I'd expected, a militarily-correct parade-ground strut as he crossed the apron, snapping back a salute to the two men and swinging himself into the staff car on the front passenger's side, barking again as the driver got in and asked him something and nodded quickly and started the engine.

  Colonel Choen.

  Access - of a sort. Access to General Kheng and finally to Pol Pot, if I got it right.

  'Your first objective,' Pringle had told me at Phnom Penh airport, 'is to gain information on that man.'

  So I waited until the car was through the gates and halfway round the perimeter road and then took up the tag.

  I watched the mirror.

  Thirty-five minutes ago the staff car had stopped outside a white two-storey building next to a temple, its walls bullet-scarred and covered with faded slogans. Colonel Choen and one of his escorts had gone into the building. The other man, the driver, was leaning against the car, smoking his third cigarette.

  An hour and fifteen minutes ago I should have telephoned Pringle at the Hotel Lafayette, but that was when the helicopter was landing, and I'd had no chance since. The traffic in Pouthisat was the same as in Phnom Penh: motorized vehicles with native drivers ploughed through everything else on the narrow streets - cyclos, oxen, pushcarts, bikes, dogs and chickens, and it had been difficult to keep track of the staff car without moving in too close.

  Now I sat watching the mirror.

  It would have been nice to fish out the half-bottle of Evian from behind the seat, but I wanted to keep movement to the minimum. I was parked facing away from the building Choen had gone in, with the jeep tight against the wall of a storage shed. The plastic rear window, scratched and yellowed, wasn't wide enough to let the Khmer driver see anything of my silhouette unless I moved, even if he took any interest. He was a rebel soldier, not an espion; if he'd been in our trade I couldn't have parked the jeep here at all.

  The heat pressed down, and instead of thinking about the bottle of Evian I thought about Salamander. It was beginning to look like a full-blown mission, despite the fact that we had no signals board in London, no contacts or couriers in the field. We had, at least, access of a sort: I was keeping surveillance on an officer in Pol Pot's forces and it might not turn out to be totally a waste of time. He might well come out of that building and get into his car and be taken back to the airfield and the helicopter: the driver had been told to wait for him. But if so, I at least had a fix on the building itself and could make a night reconnaissance, given the absence of guards, or the absence of guards difficult - in terms of number - to silence and subdue.

  It was beginning to seem conceivable that Flockhart, my control in London, wasn't totally out of his mind. He
needed - for whatever reason - information on Pol Pot, and the only way he could normally expect to get it was by forming his own little army of military. intelligence troops and sending them in - and they would have to be Asian, ideally Cambodian or Vietnamese. But the Bureau hasn't got any Asian troops, nor is it equipped to recruit any, administratively, economically or politically.

  The driver was lighting his fourth cigarette from the butt of the third, dragging the smoke in deep and holding it, not a man, you would say, with enough oxygen available to his muscles to afford him much endurance, if he were, for example, attacked.

  But then of course he had his Chinese-made assault rifle, if you were slow enough to let him use it.

  The Bureau, moreover, hasn't got even one Asian on its shadow executive staff, or he would have been the obvious choice for Salamander. All Flockhart had had when he dined with me at the Cellar Steps was a standard model ferret bored out of his gourd after six weeks without a mission, someone who would take anything on simply to keep his nerves in tune.

  And Holmes had known that, when we'd sat in the Caff drinking Daisy's undrinkable tea.

  You know Mr. Flockhart? He's quite good. Some people find him a bit on the enigmatic side, doesn't give much away. He also comes and goes, runs a mission or two and disappears for a while.

  For a control like that - senior, with the ability to pick and choose - I had been the perfect choice: seasoned enough to work an operation where a single shadow could conceivably get through to the objective while a whole battalion might fail, and desperate enough to take it on.

  So I found it comforting, as I watched the Khmer driver chain-light his fifth cigarette in the mirror, to realize that Flockhart might not simply have chosen to set me running in a manifestly doomed mission just to find out if I had a chance in a thousand of bringing it home.

  We seek comfort, my good friend, we the stalwart ferrets in the field, where we can find it.

  The sun's weight pressed down on the canvas top of the jeep; its light shimmered along the bonnet and sent reflections fanning against the wall of the storage shed; the day staggered under the burden of the afternoon sky. No one was moving in the narrow angle of the street that was all I could see through the windscreen.

  Three women had passed, minutes ago, their sarongs clinging to their stick-like bodies, their faces dark and featureless in the shade of their raffia hats as they pushed their cart along, piled with junk - to them, presumably, treasure, the sum of their worldly goods. People were leaving the cities, Gabrielle had told me, hoping to find safety in the countryside, in the mountains, in the rice fields, before whatever was to happen to Cambodia cut short their lives.

  A cyclo driver had followed them, minutes later, bowed over his rusting handlebars half-comatose, a gaunt dog lurching after him, one eye lost beneath a black cluster of flies.

  The Khmer driver lit another cigarette, took a turn, kicking the baked mud of the street with his boot, hitching his assault rifle higher, took a turn back, then looked suddenly up at the steps of the two-storey building.

  One fifty-seven, and Colonel Choen came down to the street with his escort and climbed into the car.

  Sweat cooled on my shoulders as I sat up straight and put my fingers onto the ignition key, watching the mirror, waiting. The staff car was facing away from the town, from the airfield, and if it was going to turn back it would take the next side street and turn left again and come past the storage shed. That was all right: I wouldn't by then be visible below the windscreen; there would simply be a jeep standing here.

  If the staff car kept on going in the same direction I. would need to catch up, but at a distance. That was all right too, but less easy: it would need noisy bursts of acceleration in the silence of the siesta hours.

  I started up and waited for thirty seconds, forty, fifty, heard the sound of the staff car fading and moved off and took a right and a right and a left and saw it ahead of me, bouncing across potholes in the distance, and we settled down at five hundred yards, heading out of the city and then taking a road south with the foothills forming along the horizon and the sun high and in front of us, casting short shadows.

  There was no other traffic and I dropped back, letting the staff car increase the distance to a mile and checking the mirror, hoping for moving cover, but there was nothing coming up behind.

  A bullock cart lay on its side near the road, the beast still harnessed, lowing and kicking; I couldn't see the driver. Egrets crossed the skyline in a black skein against the glare of the sun, dipping towards water somewhere. A girl sat on a pile of rice bags near a track to a farm, nursing an infant, her round raffia hat shading it from the sun. A snake, crushed by wheels, lay across the road in the shape of a question mark.

  In fifteen kilometres we were among the foothills and I closed the distance between us, reaching behind me for the bottle of Evian and draining it in gulps and dropping it back behind the seat as the road began twisting between outcrops and I had to close up again, this time to within three or four hundred yards of the staff car, less, too close, too close for comfort, dropping back again, letting its profile shrink into the distance.

  Potholes suddenly, and the jeep shuddered, the tyres skating across the surface, and I had to let the speed die, couldn't touch the brakes. The sun swung to the right, to the left, to the right again and then steadied as the road straightened and I saw it running ahead, empty now, no staff car.

  I didn't think they'd seen me and increased their speed. They wouldn't do that. If they saw me and wanted to know why I was on this road behind them they'd just slow and block my path and stop and ask questions; these were the Khmer Rouge.

  They'd turned off somewhere, at a time when they'd been out of sight past an outcrop.

  I swung the jeep in a U-turn and gunned up.

  Access of a sort, providing I didn't lose the target. A hundred kph on the clock and then slowing through the hills, seeing nothing, the sun swinging behind me now, bringing relief from the glare.

  Target not seen.

  The stretch of potholes again and I hit the brakes in time and let the jeep skitter across them, one of the headlights shattering to the vibration, glass tinkling against the bodywork in the slipstream.

  Target still not seen but there was a track to the left, hidden by boulders until I was almost on it, had to use the brakes and let the rear end swing through the U as I gunned up to get the traction back and then turned to follow the track, baked mud and loose stones, the surface natural, the way ahead formed simply by the passage of wheels over the passage of time.

  A small leopard vaulted a rock and turned to watch the jeep go past.

  Target.

  The sun flashing across its rear window as it turned in the distance ahead and below me among the hills as the track descended, stones rattling under the chassis.

  We were in a ravine, with rocks rising on each side, their shadows on the right, sharper now, the air less humid. I let the speed die again, losing the staff car from sight but not worrying.

  There wouldn't be another track leading away from this one: the terrain was too steep, too rocky.

  Flash and I saw the target again, much smaller now. But even at this distance 1 wouldn't be safe if they looked back and saw the jeep; this wasn't a public road, and any vehicle on it would belong to the forces of the Khmer Rouge. This was their private territory. It wouldn't have been possible to get even this far if I hadn't chosen a camouflaged vehicle, but that wouldn't help me if they took an interest and brought me to a stop.

  There would have to be a break-off point: at some time I would need to decide when I was as close as I could go to the target without risking exposure.

  Flash and the staff car was turning again, but this time onto a side track where the rocks gave way to flat terrain half a mile across and covered with dark green foliage - scrub or short trees, from this distance I couldn't tell which.

  Then the target vanished.

  It hadn't turned to one side
or the other: the sun had been steady on the rear window, then had gone out like a lamp switched off.

  I cut down my speed, rolled for a hundred yards and then put the jeep onto a slope of firm ground that would let me turn without having to back up, give me a chance to get out fast if I had to. Then I sat looking at the flat green terrain down there, some kind of plantation except for the rocks strewn across it, no individual bushes, no clearly-defined trees, just a stretch of - right, got it now - camouflage netting.

  This was how the staff car had vanished like that in an instant, passing under the edge of the screen and out of sight.

  The camp was perfectly placed, too far from the main track to attract visitors and too far west of the airfield in Pouthisat to be seen from the lowering flight paths. But even so, it had been decided to rig the camouflage screen to provide total concealment from the air.

  I switched off the engine, because this was the break-off point. I was as close as I could get to the target, was too close, even, for safety: if there were guards mounted there at the camp's perimeter the jeep would be in sight of them.

  The heat lay across the canyon, the sun burning its path through the sky to the south and touching fire from the rocks, dazzling the eye, leaving the lungs stifled. Under the spread of camouflage down there it would be cooler; perhaps that too was its purpose.

  There was nothing more I could do here. I couldn't hope to infiltrate an armed camp, even by night; let it be enough that I had a fix on it; the day hadn't been wasted. But as I reached for the ignition I stopped and froze as a sound came into the silence, echoing among the rocks. Another vehicle was on the move, coming the way we had come, and I slipped across the passenger's seat and dropped to the ground, crouching, listening to the sound of tyres scattering loose stones, one of them hitting the side of the jeep with the force of a bullet.

  They would see the jeep standing here, not far from the track, couldn't miss it. It was camouflaged, a military or paramilitary vehicle - that was why I'd chosen it - but it didn't carry any kind of insignia. Had the staff car carried insignia? I hadn't been close enough to the rear to see if it had or not. Did all the Khmer Rouge vehicles have insignia? It was important, because if they did, the one moving past me now would hit the brakes and slide to a halt across the stones and boots would thud to the ground and the driver would come walking across.