by Kae Bell
She shrugged. “I’m not so sure. Anything to cool down.”
Severine sat down on a long flat rock by the pool and pulled a blue plastic water bottle from the side of her pack. She drank deeply. Ben dropped his heavy pack on the grass and crouched down on his haunches, spreading a map on the empty rock next to Severine. “Alright. Let’s see where we are.”
“Yes, that’d be good to know,” Severine said.
Ben studied the map in the mid-afternoon sun, light from the pool reflecting and bouncing on his tan face. He looked at a compass and his handheld GPS, then tapped a spot on the middle left of the paper, a large area of uninterrupted green.
Severine tilted her head back in exhaustion and asked, “Please, can we call it a day?” Her voice was heavy with concern and fatigue. She’d had enough jungle for one day. It was getting late and she could see Ben was tired too, his left eye drooped when he started to fade. They were dehydrated and it was a long slog back to the road.
“Almost,” Ben said, still looking at the map.
“Well, while you decide, can I take a swim in the pool?”
Ben glanced at the water behind them and back at his wife. He wiped sweat from his brow.
“I’d prefer you didn’t. Who knows what’s in there?” He stood from his crouch.
Severine dipped her fingertips into the water. It was cool and inviting.
“How about just my feet?”
He grinned at her. “Ok, just your feet.”
She tugged at her brown bootlaces, which Ben had tied in thick double knots.
“Just my feet.” She pulled off a sock and dipped her toe and then her foot in the clear water, while Ben watched. A bird-call in the distance got his attention and he peered into the thick jungle beyond the shimmering pool.
“Hey, while you soak your toes, I’m gonna take a look down there.” He gestured beyond the water’s far edge, where a stream trickled in and the moss was greenest. The barest hint of a path suggested something beyond.
“Oh, darling. Don’t.” She lowered her head and looked up again, pleading. “Really. You can come back out here another time without me. You’re tired. We’re both tired. Let’s just rest for a moment and go back.”
Ben listened, thinking. He heard the bird call again.
“Nah, it’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be back in a flash, you won’t even notice I’m gone.” His face was filled with light, his eyes bright with the unknown. As he dug through his stuffed pack, Severine tried a different tack.
“You’re going to leave me alone, in this wild place, while you go traipsing through the jungle?”
Ben looked back at her. “You know you’re perfectly safe. You’ve got protection.” He pulled a pistol from his pack, checked it was loaded, and placed it on the flat rock by the water. “And you know how to use it. I’ll be ten minutes, out and back.” He winked at her, then bent down to chuck her under her chin and give her a quick kiss on the lips.
“That’s what you always say.” She grinned at him, hiding her concern behind a brave smile. She didn’t want to be a nagging wife. She consoled herself, this is what it’s like to be married to an adventurer.
Ben leaned over and kissed her again. This time he lingered, looking her in the eyes, tracing a finger from her temple to her chin. Then he stood and stepped away. He picked up his metal detector and walked around the pool onto the slight path, leading each step with a sweep from the detector, the machete slicing at the disgruntled underbrush.
“Call out if you need me.” He yelled back over his shoulder.
“OK.” Severine dipped her feet into the pool. She sat there for a few minutes, listening as the sound of Ben’s steps grew distant, wiping sweat from her temple with the palm of her hand. A small round stone sat by the water, its surface smooth and gray. She picked it up, tossing it into the middle of the pond, where it landed with a plunking sound, breaking the water’s surface. Ripples in the blue water distorted the reflected sunlight.
“Mosquitoes be damned,” she muttered, as she pulled off her sweaty long-sleeve shirt, revealing a black jog bra underneath. The cool air felt good on her bare arms. She stood and stripped down to reveal black boy shorts and a bright green tattoo of a small frog on her right hip. Tossing her clothes onto the rock by the gun and smacking at a hungry mosquito that had landed on her thigh, she waded into the pool, with an eye out for snakes.
The pool was ten feet across and four feet deep in the center, the bottom covered with smooth round stones, which felt good on Severine’s tired feet. She hunched down in the deepest part, so that only her neck and head were showing. She looked up at the patch of blue sky above her, framed by the tall fronds of swaying trees.
She felt a rush of cold air on her neck and turned in the water to face the direction it came from. It was just a slight breeze picking up.
Impulsively, she called out, “Ben!!”
She waited. No reply. She called out again, louder this time.
The explosion followed. She ran toward the flames, though she could see the devastation ahead was complete. In the light of the flames, she saw something glint on the ground and crawled ahead toward it in the scorching heat. There on the ground was the gnarled handle of a metal detector, bent from the blast.
*******
Andrew listened, taking notes. Severine ended her story, her eyes shining.
“How’d you get home?” Andrew thought it best to keep moving forward.
“A biker picked me up on the road. An old guy, American, gave me a ride to Sen Monorom on his Harley. Bikers like the back roads after the rains, they tear it up, for fun. I got the next helicopter back here.”
“You get this biker’s name?”
“No, I was…pretty incoherent. He’s just one of those guys you see around town, in the POW-MIA shirts.” Andrew had seen them, western men, remnants from another time, grizzled and gray.
“Did you often go with Ben on his trips?”
“No. Just this once. He insisted I come, said with everything going on, it wouldn’t last.”
“What’s ‘going on’?”
“Development. New buildings, factories, businesses. Ben said it was going to change everything. We were planning to leave next year, to go to Laos.”
She turned to the window, remembering. The moon was high in the sky, shining its light on the broken golden Buddha at Severine’s feet.
“We were planning to leave,” she repeated.
Part 2
Chapter 10
The normally shallow river, turgid from rain, had breached its banks and water flowed with greedy abandon over the flat ground, flooding the grassland and underbrush that lined the riverbank. It flowed underneath a sturdy thatched hut that stood on wooden stilts near the river’s edge, on a slight rise where the ground swelled up to meet the forest.
This river had shifted course this way and that over the years, but its waters always found the way to the South China Sea. The hut had seen many rainy seasons by this river, its thick stilts withstanding the wilt and way of the rains. It would weather many more.
Inside the hut’s thatched walls, a thin Cambodian man sat alone, on a solid bamboo chair, his large hands flat on the wood desk at the center of the room. A straw mat was rolled up in the corner. The hut was dim with dusk.
The man stared straight ahead, unblinking, waiting. His name was Mey Hakk. At this moment, he was plagued by an excruciating migraine. He sat, unmoving.
The torment had fallen on Hakk quickly today. He could always sense its onset, like a coming storm. His sight grew pixelated, a shimmering in the corner of his eye, until his entire field of vision undulated, colors and images mixing together in a miasmatic mess. And then the agony would begin, shooting in sharp arcs across his brain like a vengeful fever. If he tried to fight it, it would only last longer. All he could do was wait.
This pain infuriated him. When it passed, he would lash out at whoever was unlucky enough to be in his reach: Sometimes it was a guard; mo
re often a woman. More than once his guards had disposed of a young woman’s body after one of Hakk’s migraines.
A letter sat on the desk in front of him. It was a few short paragraphs addressed to him and signed with a flourish.
Hakk had read the letter several times since he had received it a week ago by courier. Through the hazy pain, Hakk stared at it, the words jumping off the page at him, the brazen seal mocking him.
It didn’t matter anymore. Everything was in place.
It was time. Time to begin.
*******
Hakk had been nine years old when the Khmer Rouge soldier had handed him a machine gun and told him to guard the rice fields. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge, in full control of Cambodia, implemented its vision for independence from the outside world, to abolish all aspects of government and commerce and to force the Cambodian people onto collective farms, establishing a single peasant class to work the land.
Hakk’s family, peasants from the coast, had joined the forced migration. Hakk, with his mother, father, and two older sisters, made the journey to a camp in the south with nothing but the ragged clothes on their backs. There, they had lived in a basic camp and worked the rice fields.
One day, an older Khmer Rouge guard took notice of Hakk, who was tall for his age, and strong. They needed young guards, children, not yet tainted in thought, who could be trusted. The adults needed to work the fields, to be reformed.
Hakk found himself at age nine, his hands heavy with the heft of the weapon, guarding dozens of adults. His instructions were to shoot the runners.
For five unremarkable days, he had stood guard over the rice harvest. With numb eyes, he’d watched the workers in the golden fields, as they bent low, cutting small bunches of the tall grass near the base of the stalks, tying these together carefully not to loosen the rice, and stacking these for threshing.
On the morning of the sixth day, Hakk saw a worker, a man, maybe thirty years old, hunch low among the gold stalks swaying in the breeze, watched him slither along the edge of the field, the reeds moving in his wake. The worker headed toward the forest’s edge, on the far side of the field, where he hoped, if he could run fast enough, he could escape into the wilderness, to hide and rest and find his way to freedom.
Hakk had watched with great interest as the man slid among the stalks.
As the man had stepped up from the rice paddy to the road, glancing backwards, always a mistake, Hakk had pulled the trigger, blasting a hole in the man’s right shoulder.
Despite his wound, with the forest so close, the man, a former schoolteacher, had continued running, his thin arms flailing, his breath ragged with fear and determination.
Surprised at the runner’s persistence and thrilled by the gun’s jolting action against his narrow bony shoulder, Hakk had shot the gun again and again, until the man ran no farther. Hakk walked forward and stared, entranced by the corpse on the soft brown dirt.
That had been the most exciting day of Hakk’s nine years.
For three more years he had guarded prisoners.
When they tried to escape, he shot them.
It was simple work and he was good at it.
One hot March day in 1978, Hakk was called away from his post by the fields. It was late afternoon and temperatures had reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Several workers had collapsed from heat exhaustion and Hakk had admonished them.
As Hakk followed the older guard, a boy of sixteen, he fretted that perhaps he had failed in some way. Hakk considered his actions, how he held his weapon, how he disciplined his prisoners, how he ignored their pleas for water, food, mercy.
As they walked the road toward the forest’s edge, the two boys, dressed in black, passed the workers bent low in the rice paddies, their straw hats hiding stony faces. They dared not look up at the men with guns walking by. They shuffled through the mud with their baskets of seed.
Past the rice fields, the boys moved into the woods. There, in the dense jungle, a wide clearing had been cut near a fast-running brook.
Hakk saw a large wooden platform hut and behind it, some ways off, two smaller huts, with thatched roofs and walls. Several guards stood around the perimeter of the largest hut, massive dour men dressed in simple uniforms, their faces mostly covered with the red-checked Krama to ward off the flies. Each man held a gun, much bigger than Hakk’s own. One played a wooden pipe that yielded a high thin wail, sounding, Hakk thought, like the dying cry of an animal.
The guards watched the two boys approach, their black eyes following each step. Hakk’s heart started to pound.
To Hakk’s relief, the guards let the boys pass, but only after they had relieved each of his respective weapon.
The older boy opened the tent flap for him and Hakk entered.
In the hut, it was dark. A thin candle burned on a bamboo desk. The air was sweet with honeysuckle.
Hakk knew that he was in the presence of greatness. Quiet power flowed from a figure seated in the darkest corner.
Hakk bowed down deeply from the waist, toward the shadows, not knowing what else to do. He stayed bowed, his hands pressed together as if in prayer, held close to his young heart. He waited.
The man in the shadows spoke, his Khmer that of an educated, well traveled man.
“I hear reports of those soldiers who embrace the cause, who demonstrate fierce loyalty to our Organization, who will be my leaders of tomorrow. I hear that you have great promise, that you do good work guarding our fields. Your workers fear you, they respect you. This is excellent and I commend you. One day, when you are older, I will make you a General. You will be a great leader.”
Hakk could barely speak, he was so honored, to be in the presence of and to be spoken to by the Khmer Rouge mastermind, Pol Pot himself.
But Hakk did not want to wait until he was older. He was ready for bigger things.
“I am ready. I am ready now…”
Pol Pot cut him off. “All in good time. For now, I need you to stay here, to guard the fields. I will send for you when it is time. Now, approach me.”
Hakk walked toward the darkness. There, he could see his leader seated on a deep pile of saffron-colored pillows.
Pol Pot held out a red-checked scarf, a krama like the guards outside wore.
“Here is a reminder of our talk. I do not forget those who have served me. Promise me you will always continue our work.”
Hakk reached out and took the rough scarf. He could barely speak, he was so proud.
“I promise.”
Hakk tied the krama around his neck. He would wear it and all would know that he had met with Pol Pot.
“Go now. You are needed back on the fields.”
“Ah kuhn, ah kuhn.” Thank you, thank you. Hakk bowed low again as he backed away, exiting the tent. He ran all the way back to the field, his weapon, retrieved from the guards, jangling at his side.
When, many months later, word arrived that the Vietnamese had come to release the workers from the fields, and that Pol Pot had fled in disgrace to the distant jungle, Hakk had dropped his gun in a muddy rice paddy, stuffed the krama in his pocket, and blended in with the masses of survivors, who left the rice fields in a daze, unbelieving that the nightmare had ended. Hakk had convincingly played the role of a boy who'd lost his family to starvation, disease and brutality. This was a true for so many, why not him.
He had only a krama scarf to remind him of his promise. Hakk vowed to see the promise through. No matter when. No matter how.
*******
Over the decades, the promise to Pol Pot had wormed its way into every cell of Hakk’s body until he became the promise itself. Until it was his only truth.
Each day when he woke he told himself, he would save his countrymen from the depravity he saw all around him. Each night, he whispered that he would cleanse their hearts.
Most importantly, he promised himself, he would expel the foreigners, who corrupted his country with their wicked, greedy ways, their social-climbing, do-go
oding, snake-eyed deception, smiling while they built their fortunes on Cambodia’s birthright. The land.
He had watched his country lose its way. He had endured the shame of its profligate and promiscuous ways, wooing outsiders to come, to see, to taste.
He had endured this. But soon it would end. While it had taken years to lay the groundwork of the coming purge and destruction, now, he had set things in motion. Fulfilling his promise at last.
He had many followers, like-minded men, who also wished to return to the simpler time, to the time of Pol Pot’s Angkar, the Organization, when all men were one, all the same. Freed from the self, freed from want and desire. Cleansed of thought by work.
And the Ch’kai. The vermin. The foreigners. They would be expelled or destroyed, fear a dagger in their hearts.
Hakk’s own heart seized, as the pain faded and his mind cleared.
By the light of a single flame, he set to work. It was time.
Chapter 11
Andrew stretched back in his chair, reaching his long arms high toward the unfinished ceiling. He glanced at his watch. It was 1:00 AM. Sheesh, he thought. He’d been hunched over the computer for three hours. For someone who disliked office work, he was getting good at it. He’d come back to the Embassy after settling Severine in for the night. They’d swept up the mess in the hall, locked all the windows and doors. He had promised to call in the morning.
Since then, he’d read everything Flint had sent on Ben Goodnight. But he still had too little to go on. He needed to see that Ministry report.
Andrew stood, stretched left and right, and peered out the high small window into the night. Streetlights shone on the manicured embassy lawn. It was time to call it a night.
He headed out the maze of the basement hallways, his shoes squeaking on the scuffed floor. Up the stairs and out into the main hallway. This late, the lights had been dimmed. His footsteps echoed in the lobby.
Outside, freed from the sterile embassy air conditioning, Andrew breathed in the night air, filled with the scent of incense and fresh coconut.
