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

by Peter May

  A shiver ran through him, a quick unaccountable chill in the heat of the night.

  ‘And when they have no further use for you, you find it hard to stop. It’s what you know, it’s what you do best. It has become a habit. So you sell yourself to whoever will buy. No proud tradition, no heritage of freedom.’ He paused. ‘No hypocrisy.’ He smiled without humour, a heavy irony in his chuckle. ‘For what we do we would once have been heroes. Now we are despised.’

  ‘Despised?’ Her brow crinkled in a frown of confusion.

  ‘Hated.’ He wondered how much she had really understood, wondered what it mattered how little she did.

  ‘And you no mind?’

  He smiled at the absurdity of her question. ‘What’s to mind?’

  ‘If you choose be hated,’ she said solemnly, ‘then no one love you.’

  Elliot’s smile faded. ‘That’s right, little girl,’ he said. ‘No one loves you.’

  They sat in silence for a long, long time, and Elliot thought how comforting the night was, the dark wrapped around them a cloak of safety, all things hidden from the world. Ironic that they should be safe in the dark, the stuff of most men’s nightmares. It was with the light, he knew, that danger would come, perhaps death. He glanced at the child’s face beside him and felt awkward in the presence of such innocence, an innocence that could kill, incorruptible in its silent accusation. And yet, he knew, it was not her innocence that accused, but his guilt. ‘You should sleep,’ he advised.

  Her eyes were unflickering as they gazed off into the blackness. ‘Every time I close eyes I see his face,’ she said. ‘He was so – surprise. Did he really think I love him? Did he think I choose to go with him all those time?’

  And now Elliot realized why she had done it, and he too wondered at the cadre’s surprise. He was aware of the turn of her head, her eyes watching him for a long moment, almost as though she knew what had gone through his mind.

  ‘You see your friend when you close eyes?’ she said.

  His face stung, as if she had slapped him. His mouth and throat were dry and he wished like hell he had another cigarette. ‘He was dying,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

  ‘Mistah McCue don’ think so.’

  ‘Mr McCue didn’t know.’ He turned to see confusion in her frown. ‘It wasn’t his wounds,’ he said. ‘You see . . .’ He searched for the words. ‘Mr Slattery came here to die. He had stomach cancer.’

  ‘Cancer?’ The word meant nothing to her.

  ‘A sickness,’ he said. ‘Something bad that grows inside you and kills you. Even if he had survived his wounds, the cancer would have killed him. He only had a few weeks left, maybe months.’

  ‘And you would have not kill him if he had not this – cancer?’

  It was the question that had filled his own thoughts for the last two days. One he could never answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said simply, and stared hard at his hands clenched together on his knees in front of him. She reached out and placed her small hand gently over his. He tensed, her touch like an electric shock. And suddenly all tension seeped away, like a burden lifted. For the first time in as many years as he could remember, he had lifted a self-imposed embargo on himself. He had shared a part of himself with someone else. With the sharing came relief. But it also brought a feeling he had not known since childhood. Of vulnerability. And with that, fear.

  He withdrew his hands from her touch and glanced down the length of the stricken craft. Serey still slept in the bottom of the boat and, at the far end, McCue dozed lightly, his mouth gaping a little. Moonlight reflected on the water seeping slowly but insistently through the boards of the hull. Elliot handed Ny a tin mug and lifted one himself. ‘Better start baling,’ he said. ‘We’re shipping more water.’

  *

  The dawn took them by surprise. The darkness lifted suddenly, receding west as the first rays of early morning yellow light fanned out from the watery horizon. McCue stood bleary-eyed scanning the endless expanse of Tonle Sap that surrounded them. He flashed a grim glance in Elliot’s direction and shook his head.

  ‘How’s our water?’ he asked.

  ‘About one more day.’ Elliot arched his eyebrows, creasing his forehead. ‘If we go easy.’

  ‘Is there any point?’ Serey glanced wearily from one to the other. ‘We are going to die out here anyway, are we not? And without food or water, it will be a very slow death.’

  ‘Not if my buddy here put a bullet through our heads. Then it could be quick and easy, just like it was for Mikey. That right, Elliot?’ McCue’s smile was a humourless grimace.

  Elliot moved towards the stern. ‘I suggest we try and get this outboard working,’ he said as though McCue had not spoken. Ny watched him, concerned. Why didn’t he say something to defend himself? Why didn’t he tell the American the truth?

  McCue moved to the back of the boat to join him, and the two men crouched over the motor to resume the hopeless task of stripping and reassembling. Ny turned to her mother. ‘We’re not going to die,’ she said in a high, almost hysterical voice. ‘We’re not!’ Serey sat unmoved, staring across the water, her face grey and gaunt. She gave no indication that she had even heard.

  By mid-morning, after repeated failure to restart the outboard, McCue and Elliot gave up and collapsed into the bottom of the boat, running with sweat, gasping in the heat. Serey watched them expressionlessly from the shade of McCue’s makeshift awning. ‘Goddam!’ McCue shouted in sheer frustration. ‘Goddam this fucking country!’

  ‘Shhhh!’ Ny waved a hand to silence him. She had moved up to the stern when the two men had given up on the outboard, and was staring intently out across the lake.

  Elliot pulled himself quickly on to his knees and followed her eye line. He could see nothing. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A sound,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

  McCue sat up, too, and strained to hear. ‘I don’t hear nothing.’

  But Elliot was still listening. ‘It’s an engine,’ he said, and his eyes raked back and forth across the horizon.

  McCue focused all his attention on the apparent silence before he too picked up the distant growl of a motor. ‘Got it,’ he said.

  ‘There!’ Elliot pointed suddenly to the south-west. And out of the blur of blue, shimmering heat, a tiny dark speck seemed to grow on the horizon.

  ‘A boat,’ McCue whispered.

  *

  The power launch had once been the property of a wealthy Phnom Penh businessman who kept it moored at an exclusive marina outside the city, using it for weekend fishing trips and pleasure cruises on the Great Lake. It had been lavishly appointed with six berths and a small galley finished in rich mahogany and polished brass. Since 1975 it had been used to ferry important Khmer Rouge cadres and officials back and forth across the Mekong, between Phnom Penh and the Royal Palace, with occasional trips up the length of the Tonle Sap. As it powered its way north yet again, across the endless expanse of the largest body of inland water in Indochina, it had changed hands once more.

  Hou Nim stood at the helm, a short wiry figure in his late thirties. His black tunic and trousers hung limp on his lean frame, and a little of the tension that had held him like a clenched fist these last hours had begun to ease. His eyes were dry and gritty, and screwing them up against the reflected glare from the water he felt a wave of fatigue wash over him. He blinked several times, striving to refocus his wandering concentration. The cabin was stifling. A small fan mounted above the dashboard followed an erratic path from left to right and back again, barely ruffling the oppressive airless heat.

  He had been at the wheel for nearly six hours since he and his two younger companions had slipped stealthily through the midnight shadows of the deserted Phnom Penh docks to board the vessel in which he had so often ferried the leaders of the revolution: the pompous, self-important Pol Pot, with his fat face and fish
eyes; the shrewd watchful countenance of Khieu Samphan; even, once, the darting, frightened, rabbit eyes of Prince Sihanouk himself, unwilling accomplice and virtual prisoner of the Khmer Rouge – a diplomatic sop to the constant stream of wary Chinese advisers in Western suits without whose backing the revolution could never have survived. And, in these last months and weeks, he had seen the corrupt confidence of absolute power gradually vaporize, replaced in his passengers’ eyes by a growing panic, that only fuelled their toxic fanaticism.

  Fear stalked the empty streets of the capital now like all the ghosts of the Cambodian dead come back to haunt their murderers. The tattered remnants of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea were heading north in disarray. Phnom Penh was being abandoned to its fate, though the leadership were still there, clinging insanely to the hope that the Vietnamese, less than fifty kilometres to the south, could yet be stopped. Only hours before Nim had taken his fateful decision to escape the city, he had listened to Pol Pot announcing over Radio Phnom Penh that the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea would achieve certain victory over the Vietnamese invader. But the procession of Chinese diplomatic personnel, technicians, military advisers, and dependants, heading for the airport, clearly demonstrated that the Chinese thought otherwise.

  Nim, like his companions, had been a fisherman before the revolution – the old people as they had been called, as opposed to the new people from the cities. It was his knowledge of boats that had saved him from a wretched existence digging endless canals or toiling in the paddies. Their relatively privileged position, maintaining and operating the launch for the Party hierarchy, had meant they were well fed and well billeted in almost civilized conditions. But they were now under no illusion that the period of comparative security they had enjoyed in the last four years was drawing to an end.

  It had been Nim’s idea to take the launch and head north across the Tonle Sap. Rath, the son of a former village chief and friend of Nim, and his cousin, Sien, had taken little persuading. They looked up to the older man who had promised Rath’s father that he would keep them safe. They had survived the years of horror virtually unscathed, and were ready to trust him again. The lake, Nim had argued, was their safest means of escape. It would be fast and, since the Khmer Rouge had little in the way of waterborne transport, once they were out on the Great Lake there would be virtually no danger. The riskiest part of the plan was sneaking the boat out of the docks, and the first stage of their journey up the short stretch of the Mekong into the river that flowed out of the Tonle Sap itself. Which was why they had decided to make their break during the hours of darkness. And in the confusion and slack security of the besieged city it had, in the event, proved surprisingly easy. Now they were heading for a small village on the north-eastern shore of the lake. They had no idea what might await them there, but it was home – and they hadn’t seen home for a very long time.

  Rath was asleep down below on one of the bunks. Sien was on the roof of the cabin, supposedly keeping watch and manning the six-barrelled machine gun that had been mounted there four years earlier. But he was probably asleep, too. Nim glanced at the large compass set into the mahogany fascia in front of him, checked his bearing, then looked up again, beyond the fluttering red flag at the bow of the boat, sweeping his gaze across the unending horizon ahead. For a moment he thought he must have been mistaken, a brief dark speck in his peripheral vision. His eyes flickered back in its direction, and he frowned into the glare. A boat? It was still too far away to be certain. It might be debris of some kind, a tree perhaps. He was tempted to give it a wide berth – it was very small, whatever it was. But he was curious. If it was a boat, what was it doing out here in the middle of the lake? He changed course, tilting them to the east, and the bow of the launch knifed its way towards the distant object.

  As he drew closer, within half a kilometre, Nim saw that it was indeed a boat. A small, open fishing craft, little more than a canoe. He pulled back on the throttle, slowing their approach, and banged on the roof.

  ‘Hey, Sien, wake up! Boat ahead!’

  Sien was awake instantly, uncurling from his foetal position and springing to his feet. He blinked several times in the flashing sunlight before focusing on the small fishing boat bobbing aimlessly on the water a few hundred metres away. Rath, roused by Nim’s voice and the sudden change in the pitch of the engine, emerged sleepily on to the deck.

  ‘What is it?’

  Nim pointed ahead and Rath turned his gaze in the direction of the fishing boat. Quickly he ducked back into the cabin and re-emerged clutching an AK-47. Nim had reduced their speed to a crawl, and he approached cautiously.

  ‘Any sign of life?’ he called up to Sien.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ Sien shouted back. He clasped the grips of the heavy machine gun and swung it on its mounting to point at the small craft as they approached, hooking a nervous finger around the trigger. Rath moved warily along the rail towards the prow of the launch, keeping his eyes fixed on the gentle motion of the fishing boat.

  As he was almost upon it, Nim swung the wheel hard left and careened to a stop, side on, towering over the stricken craft and causing it to roll dangerously. He moved out of the cabin and joined Rath at the rail to find himself looking down into the leaking hull of the tiny vessel and raising astonished eyebrows at what he saw.

  A sheet of torn and dirty matting had been draped across two planks to create a makeshift shelter at one end, and huddled in its shadow among a pile of canvas packs were an old woman and a young girl. The stern was strewn with the pieces of an unserviceable outboard, and two tin mugs bobbed in the water sloshing back and forth in the bottom of the boat. It was clearly leaking badly and would not stay afloat much longer. From the skin hanging loosely around her neck, the cadaverous cheeks pitted with sores, and the skull that stretched the skin of her shrunken face, Nim saw with a shock that the old woman was barely alive. Her dead eyes stared listlessly up at him from the shadows. The girl, though strained and frightened, looked in better shape. Her eyes burned black with fear.

  ‘Runaways,’ Sien called from the roof of the cabin, the relief audible in his voice. And he relaxed his grip on the machine gun and laughed. ‘I don’t fancy yours much, Rath.’

  Rath grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You always did go for older women.’

  But Nim was still tense. ‘What have you got in there?’ he called to the women.

  ‘We need help.’ Ny’s voice was quivering. ‘We are sinking.’

  ‘We have no room,’ Nim said.

  Rath turned to him. ‘Of course we have. We’ve no use for the old one. But the girl . . . When was the last time you had a woman, Uncle Nim?’

  Sien jumped down from the roof to join them and leered over the rail. ‘She’s a pretty little thing, that one. I’ll get her.’ He swung a leg over the rail, but Nim grabbed his arm.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t like this. What are they doing here – two women on their own?’

  ‘Runaways, like Sien said.’ Rath glanced back at the girl and felt the stirrings of lust between his legs.

  ‘You’ve just forgotten what it’s like, old man,’ Sien snarled, pulling free of Nim’s grasp. ‘Me and Rath, we’re younger, we’ve got needs.’

  ‘The only thing we need is to survive,’ Nim snapped. ‘There’s something not right about this. Where did they get these?’ He pointed to the canvas packs under the awning.

  ‘Who knows, who cares?’ Rath sneered. ‘How can an old woman and a young girl be a danger to us?’

  ‘I’ll check it out,’ Sien said, and he skipped over the railing before Nim could stop him, and clambered down into the boat. Ny’s grip tightened around the butt of Elliot’s revolver hidden below her tunic.

  On the far side of the launch, Elliot and McCue slipped quietly out of the water and pulled themselves noiselessly aboard. Elliot pointed to the machine gun on the cabin roof. McCue nodded and climbed,
catlike, up the side of the cabin, hidden from the view of the three Khmers whose attention was still focused on Serey and Ny. Elliot drew a long hunting blade from his belt and crouching low, inched his way around the forward side of the cabin, bare feet leaving soft wet footprints in his wake.

  Sien grinned lecherously at Ny. He pulled one of the canvas packs out from the awning and, squatting in the bottom of the boat, started rifling through its contents. He arched his eyebrows in surprise. Maps, a shortwave radio, various foreign provisions. He looked up at the two women and frowned in suspicion.

  ‘Where’d you get this?’

  ‘What is it?’ Nim called.

  But Sien paid no attention. Instead he drew a knife from his belt and moved towards Ny. ‘I asked you a question!’ he hissed.

  Ny stiffened with fear, and almost involuntarily started to draw the revolver. But her clumsy movement alerted Sien and he grabbed her wrist, twisting it backwards so that the revolver swung up and then fell harmlessly from her grasp. ‘Well, well,’ he said grinning, ‘a dangerous little thing, aren’t you?’ And he glanced at the revolver, his expression hardening. ‘Now where would you get something like that?’ His body partially masked the view from the launch, and Nim leaned nervously over the rail.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Sien barely registered the movement beside him, turning instinctively to find himself staring into the barrel of McCue’s revolver clutched between Serey’s trembling hands. For a moment he tensed, then relaxed and stretched his lips across yellowing teeth in a humourless grimace as Serey jerked the trigger. The explosion was deafening in the confined space, and Serey and Ny felt a singeing flash of heat. Warm blood spattered across their faces as the bullet punched a hole through Sien’s face, hurling him backwards into the bottom of the boat.

  There was a second of startling confusion in Rath’s mind before he swung his AK-47 towards the women in the boat below. But his finger never reached the trigger. A burst of fire sprayed half a dozen bullets into his lower back, cutting him almost in two and launching him over the rail to sprawl across the corpse of his cousin below.