by Andy Maslen
The last five miles had been over rutted and potholed tracks that were little more than flattened areas of forest floor. He’d been told by the proprietors of the guest house that the locals would wait for their cattle to make paths through the forest before venturing outside their known network of roads and village courtyards. Maybe this was one such track, cleared by cows simply looking for a stream or some fresh grazing.
He wondered how many bovine landmine casualties there had been, or whether cows had some innate ability to detect and avoid buried explosives. His spine protested with a sharp jab of pain with each jolting lurch down into and then out of a pothole. After his teeth had clacked together once too often, he swore, pulled over in a wider stretch of track to allow a motorbike or cart to pass, and climbed out.
He jammed his fists into the small of his back and arched over them, turning his face up to the sun and groaning as the muscles and ligaments holding his vertebrae in place creaked and pinged in protest. On the other side of the cab, he opened the door and reached in to retrieve the M16 and the daysack. Settling the latter onto his back and slinging the former over his right shoulder, he set off down the track.
According to the GPS, Eli should be no more than a mile ahead. On a reasonably well-kept road, that would have taken no more than quarter of an hour. On this particular example of rural transportation engineering he felt he should allow at least twenty-five.
As he walked, he pulled out the satphone and called Eli. Her phone rang on and on but she didn’t pick up. Gabriel felt a sudden anxiety squirrelling around in his gut.
“Come on, Eli,” he said, pulling the phone away from his ear and checking the display. “Stay with me.”
6
The Second Mine
By Eli’s side, the satphone rang. She didn’t answer. Her head lolled forward on her chest, her arms hung limply at her sides, palms uppermost. Her body was struggling to combat the infection that was raging through her bloodstream. The wound on her knee was filling with pus and the stench was attracting insects. Small brown flies were swarming around the dressing, landing from time to time and crawling around the edges of the bandage. Fifty yards away, prowling along a stone rampart, the leopard was staring down at her.
* * *
The temperature had soared during the morning. Gabriel estimated it as approaching forty Celsius. The humidity was intense, too, and the sweat flowed from him in rivulets, salt stinging his eyes. He came to a grove of mango trees, some of whose branches were overhanging the track. The fruit were so ripe they were falling to the ground with soft thumps. On impact, the yellow-skinned fruits split open to reveal golden-yellow flesh. Gabriel stooped to retrieve an undamaged fruit and cut it open with the Böker. As he walked, he slurped the sweet, aromatic flesh down.
Ahead, he caught a flash of grey-white hide covering a set of bony hips. One of the scrawny cattle farmed up here by the local people was wandering along the red-earth track in front of him. It must have heard, or sensed, his approach, because it turned its head to see who was approaching. At the sight of someone so clearly not part of the local ecosystem, the cow took fright.
With a single deep bellow of fear, it rotated through ninety degrees and crashed off into the undergrowth. Gabriel watched it go, wishing he’d been able to somehow give the beast more advance warning. Then, with a flash of light and a loud bang, the cow turned into a spraying cloud of blood and flesh fragments. A piece of one of its lower legs spun past Gabriel’s head before bouncing off a banana palm.
Shit! A landmine. I’m sorry . Then, aloud, Gabriel spoke the words taught to him as a child by Master Zhao, his childhood mentor and surrogate father. “I honour your life.”
The cow would provide sustenance for hundreds or maybe thousands of forest creatures, from raptors and wild cats to beetles and flies. He consoled himself with the thought that fate had merely decreed that the cow should enter the food chain a little earlier than planned.
He pushed on, the cloying smell of blood and acrid smoke from the mine’s TNT charge thick in his nostrils.
After twenty minutes of walking, during which time the track had deteriorated to the point it barely deserved the name, something about the quality of the sounds from the forest made Gabriel stop and listen. The choir of insects was in full song, joined by tootling birds, and unidentifiable cries and calls that might have been frogs, birds or mammals. But there was a faint reverberation to the sound, as if it were bouncing around. The temple. I must be almost there.
Wiping the sweat from his face once again, he unshouldered the M16 and pulled back the charging lever. It snapped back, chambering a 5.56mm NATO round. A round that would yaw in soft tissue, the result of its centre of mass being forward of its centre of gravity. Anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way would sustain catastrophic soft tissue injuries as the wobbling bullet wrought its black magic inside them.
A civilian would have begun shouting for their lost partner as soon as the towering edifice of the temple appeared before them. A civilian would have run for the vast stone gateway and jumped over its fallen lintel, which must have crashed to the ground many years earlier.
A civilian would have tired themselves out in the heat, dashing around in a random search for their loved one. But Gabriel Wolfe was not a civilian. Or not in any sense that mattered, beyond the strict legal definition. No, he was not a serving member of Her Majesty’s armed forces. He did not wear a uniform. Or not one issued by the Ministry of Defence. But as an operator for The Department, and one with a background in The Parachute Regiment and 22 SAS, his reactions and his behaviour were different.
An old army mantra played in his head on loop: look for the presence of the abnormal and the absence of the normal . On patrol in an Afghan village, why are there no children in the street? Normally they’d be playing in the street, maybe kicking an improvised football around or squatting in little groups chattering. No kids might mean IEDs, or an ambush. Is there a car in a pedestrianised area? Could be a car bomb. Or a man in a combat jacket and jeans in a financial district? It might mean nothing. It might mean he’s a suicide bomber. You go carefully, and you stay alert.
So Gabriel stopped walking. He took a water bottle from his daysack and drank half of it. Then he scanned the area in front of him. If he’d been a tourist, he’d have gasped in wonder.
In front of him, smothered with creepers and overhung with tall trees that drooped over its collapsed walls as if exhausted by the heat, an ancient temple loomed. To each side of the massive stone entrance, carved lions twice as tall as a man stood guard. Their mouths grimaced, cheeks pulled back to reveal a double row of pointed teeth. The path, paved with uneven flagstones, led between them and on for a hundred yards to the main body of the temple.
He looked along the path, saw nothing. Checked left and right, again, nothing. Behind him and above, still just him and the millions of insects, birds and animals treating the place as their private sanctuary. Or killing ground.
He stepped over the fallen lintel that partially covered the threshold – a flat stone bar between the lions’ feet. In Buddhist culture, to tread on it was considered unlucky. And right now, Gabriel felt he needed all the help he could get.
As he walked onwards, he raised the satphone to his ear and called Eli again. No answer. He let it ring and held it by his side. He strained to catch the ringing sound of her unit that would tell him she was close. He held his breath and closed his eyes, then exhaled slowly through his open mouth, feeling the warm moist air leave his lungs. Come on, Eli .
Was that it! He’d heard a faint de-de-de-de-de-de-de- that might be the distinctive ringing of the military-issue satphones. But then, he reasoned, it could just as easily be a bird, or even a frog, calling for a mate, or warning others off its territory.
He repacked the phone and walked on, M16 held across his body.
Everywhere he looked, he saw huge piles of cuboid stone blocks. The walls had collapsed or, he supposed, the Khmer Rouge had smashed
them down in pursuit of their obscene idea of creating a pure, Marxist Cambodia in “Year Zero”.
Mother Nature was playing her part in transforming order into chaos. Trees grew on narrow ramparts, their roots stretching down through clear air until they reached the red earth and burrowed deep in search of water, or squeezing between stones until they forced them apart, to tumble onto the piles of their fellows waiting for them on the ground.
Reaching a small rectangular clearing, bordered on three sides by thirty-foot walls carved with dancing gods and goddesses, he unshouldered his daysack and laid the rifle beside it. Sun was streaming into the central space, illuminating patches of vivid green vegetation, bright with scarlet and yellow flowers.
He turned through 360 degrees, looking high and then low, searching for a hiding place where he might find Eli. He wasn’t ready to admit it to himself, but there was every chance she was already dead. From dehydration, a wound, a fall or even from a bite from some local creepy crawly. He looked down at the satphone. Was it worth one more try?
7
Pretty Pussy-Cat
Eli enjoyed being free of her earthly body. From her vantage point high above the ground, she looked down at her slumped form. The bandage around her knee had turned a disgusting yellow-brown, and it stank. She could smell it from here. Pus. Decay. Rot. Her trouser leg was stained a deep red from the blood. Around her, brightly coloured birds and butterflies fluttered and swirled, encouraging her to join them. I’m not ready , she thought. Not yet. Let me spend some more time with him .
A giant butterfly the size of her two outspread hands, its wings an iridescent blue, landed on a carved monkey beside her. It opened its mouth and emitted a loud electronic peeping. Then it spoke.
“You’ll have to fight, then, Eli. The odds are stacked against him.”
“I will. If I can.”
“Then go back. He’s calling you.”
It emitted the electronic sound again.
De-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-
Eli opened her eyes to find herself slumped painfully against a stone block, her neck bent at an unnatural angle. The satphone by her left hip was ringing. She snatched it up.
“Gabriel?”
“Oh, thank God. When you didn’t answer, I thought –”
“I’m here. I’m OK. Come and get me.”
“Where?”
“It’s like a walled garden. I don’t know where, exactly. Wait! I have a pistol. I’ll fire a shot. Try and get a fix.”
“OK. Ready.”
Eli picked up the Makarov. As she did so, she noticed the leopard watching her from no further than twenty feet away. Don’t make me kill you, pussy-cat , she thought. You’re much too pretty . Perhaps sensing that the black object in her hand might give her an advantage over its teeth and claws, the leopard retreated ten feet. Then it turned, leapt onto a fallen tree and scooted up its tilted trunk to the safety of a stone tower carved with enormous Buddha faces.
Aiming vertically, she fired once, wincing as the report intensified her headache, which had been building steadily for the past few hours. Breathing in the sharp smell of the cheap Russian gunpowder, she raised the satphone to her ear again.
“Did you hear me?” she asked.
“I think they heard you back in Siem Reap,” Gabriel answered. “I’m on my way. Hold on.”
* * *
The gunshot was monstrously loud in the hard acoustics of the temple. It had come, Gabriel estimated, from somewhere to his left. He picked up his daysack and the M16 and set off at a fast walk. He was drenched in sweat and his eyes were stinging from the salt.
He reached a low wall, clambered onto the top and then made his way up one of the sloping piles of stone blocks to a higher rampart. He had to negotiate several twisting roots the thickness of his arm that coiled their way across, around and through the gigantic cubes of greenish-grey stone.
Reaching the top, he cupped his hands around his mouth and called out.
“Eli! Can you hear me?”
Straightaway she answered him and his heart leapt.
“I’m over here.”
He looked down and saw her immediately. She was lying with her back against a wall and waving feebly, her hand raised only a little way above her elbow.
Going as fast as he dared, he descended the jumbled pile of stones on the other side of the wall. Jumping down from the final block, he made his way to her across the flat quadrangle of tramped-flat earth. He knelt beside her and grabbed her in a fierce hug, before releasing her.
“How are you? What happened to your leg?”
She smiled weakly up at him.
“I stepped on a landmine. It was faulty. I think only the detonator went off, or a partial charge, but I’m burnt and my knee was laid open.”
“OK, let’s have a look.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s one fifteen. Now, hold still.”
Gabriel drew his knife and cut away the stained, stinking bandage from her knee. He wrinkled his nose as the strip of grubby cotton fabric came free. The wound was filled with bloody pus, its edges red and puffy.
“That’s badly infected. I need to clean it and redress it. I’ve got some stuff in my med kit that’ll help with the pain.”
He used some water from his canteen to clean out the wound, trying to ignore Eli’s whimper of pain. Next he injected her with the antibiotic and followed the shot with a second syringe of morphine.
Eli sighed as the needle went in.
“Oh, man, that feels good. I hope you’ve got plenty more in there, doc. ”
Gabriel smiled.
“Enough to keep you going till we get you back to base.”
“Listen, there’s a biggish cat stalking around, a leopard, I think. It’s been sniffing around, getting cockier. I don’t want to kill it but you need to do something or we’re going to have to.”
Gabriel thought back to the dead cow.
“OK. I think I can distract it long enough for us to exfil.” He handed her the M16. “Take this. It’s nice and loud and you’ll be able to scare it off if it comes back before I do.”
“Where are you going?”
“Butcher’s shop to get some cat food.”
She furrowed her brow.
Leaving her with the canteen of water, he stood and drew his Sig. He made his way back the way he’d come until he reached the site of the cow’s untimely demise. He took a bearing on one of the more manageable pieces of the carcass. Then, after holstering the Sig, he broke off a branch from a nearby sapling and started sweeping a path clear through the fallen leaves and forest debris. The chances of there being another mine between the main path and the one that had killed the cow were slim. But slim or not, that still meant he could join it in the low-hanging branches as more food for vultures.
Sweeping methodically from left to right and back again, Gabriel cleared away everything that littered the ground for a couple of feet in front of him. Then, using the other end of the broken branch, he scribbled the top layer of sandy earth away, heart thumping in his chest, butterflies swarming in his gut. On his knees, he leaned over to inspect the ground. He could see no raised detonators. No pins, rings, plates or plungers. He advanced two feet. Repeated the process. Crawled ahead again.
He was just about to place his right knee down when the dry earth a few inches further forward started funnelling down into a regularly shaped depression, almost as if it were running through an oversized egg timer.
8
Half a Hindquarter
There must have been an air gap beneath the mine. The sweeping had disturbed the delicate equilibrium around it and allowed the dry earth covering the detonator to trickle down. Gabriel stopped dead. His knee hovered just a couple of inches above the ground, then moved back. He realised he’d been holding his breath, and let it out in a controlled sigh.
Standing just proud of the dusty red earth was a black plastic disc, from which four stubby arms protruded, north, sout
h, east and west. Gabriel leaned forwards and blew. The detonator was revealed in all its malevolent glory, set into a black plastic disc and enclosed in a green steel ring: the top of the mine casing.
Gabriel had studied mines as part of his SAS training. He recognised this model. It was a Russian PMN 2 anti-personnel mine. Small enough to fit on the palm of a man’s hand and containing a tiny amount of TNT – just 115 grammes. Yet subject it to anything above five kilos of pressure and it would explode with enough force to mutilate or kill. Cows, soldiers, pregnant women, children, farmers, doctors, engineers, teachers: mines were indiscriminate killers.
Left behind in their millions by the Americans, the Khmer Rouge and, finally, the North Vietnamese, the mines were still killing and maiming Cambodians in their thousands. But at least this one wouldn’t be adding to the grotesque tally of amputees. Pulling out the Böker, Gabriel dug the mine out. He moved it to one side then made it, without any further incident, to the chunk of bloody flesh and bone he’d fixed on.
He retrieved the meat – a section of the animal’s hindquarter by the look of it – and started dragging it back along his mine-free trail, pausing briefly to collect the mine. Shuffling backwards on his knees and elbows, it took more than five minutes to regain the safety of the main path. By the time he got there, his face was running with sweat. He could feel his shirt sticking to his chest and the skin between his shoulder blades.
He stood up and made his way back to Eli, partial cow hindquarter swinging from one hand, mine gripped in the other.
