by Kae Bell
Frank clapped his hands together. “All right. Best let everyone know we’re outta here. How’s the bomb disposal going Harry?”
Harry looked up. He’d pulled off a metal plate and was staring at an imposing tangle of wires, red and green and blue. In his hand he held a pair of metal clippers, his bent arthritic hands shaking as they gripped the yellow rubber handles.
“It’s a doozy!” He shook the tool in the air. Ed, next to him, grabbed the extended clippers and said, “Let me try. You don’t know what you’re doing anyway.” The two men set to bickering.
“Here she is.” Bob said, looking upriver. Severine followed his gaze.
Around the bend, a long black line appeared on the river. Severine had never seen a submarine up close. Samnang hung by her side, frightened of the metal creature that neared the beach.
The submarine creaked as it approached the beach from up river. Severine watched, fascinated as the sub came into better view. It was actually dark grey, not black. It slowed and with a quiet whirring sound it stopped in the deepest part of the canal. A metal portal on top flipped open. Stuart popped his head out of the portal.
“Alright, I got her on stand-by. Let’s go folks! I don’t know how much juice this old tin can has got left in her!”
The people on the beach walked to the river’s edge, where Frank ferried them in the canoe to the waiting submarine. One by one, they climbed onto the deck of the old submarine. The fellows with canes left the bomb reluctantly, Ed glancing back at his handiwork. The clock continued to count down.
Once on the submarine, the men tap-tapped their way along the deck. Harry gave the boat a sharp jab with his cane.
“Is this thing solid?”
Bob grinned. “We better hope so!”
By now, only one person remained on the beach watching all this departure activity. Jeremy paced along the shore, staring first at the field of gold figures then back at the submarine.
“I’m not leaving this. It’s millions of dollars of gold. I’ll load this into the fishing boat. Or I’ll go out the other way.”
Severine glanced back at him. She turned to Frank, “Should we force him to leave?”
Frank shrugged. “He’s a grown man, he can do what he likes.” Frank glanced at his watch. “And if he stays here, by my calculations,” he nodded at the bomb, “He’s got about an hour left in which to do that.”
Severine glanced back once more and then shepherded Samnang down into the submarine’s hold.
“Is that everybody?” Bob yelled down into the tin can about to be their home for the next several hours.
Severine looked up, as the round portal door closed and the hatch was sealed. She felt her chest tighten.
Frank patted her arm. “This is gonna be a wild ride, little lady. Hang on.”
Bob yelled out to his first officer, the checkers-playing cane-wielding Ed.
“Full speed ahead. We’re on the move.”
Outside, Jeremy stood amidst the gold statues, watched the submarine move away down the canal. He started to drag the closest gold statue in the direction of the beach, where the bomb counted time in fleeting seconds.
Chapter 31
The helicopter flew low along the shoreline, the thup thup thup of its rotor muted by the crashing surf. An approaching typhoon had kicked up the seas of the Gulf of Thailand and spray spattered the cockpit windows. The winds would only increase. In this rough weather, the chopper had a short timeframe to be out safely. Once the heavy winds hit, it would be forced to ground.
The helicopter held two occupants: The young pilot that had ferried Andrew home from Mondulkiri and a woman beside him, who stared hard at a map as if her life depended on it. Flint, her eyes squinting, her mouth in a worried frown, looked out into the night.
She’d flown from Dulles to Singapore while Andrew had been in Mondulkiri, once her team had confirmed Mey Hakk as the source of the Ch’kai email. She’d also heard some disturbing rumors about an Embassy attaché gone missing. She’d flown onward to Phnom Penh when Andrew had insisted on chasing Hakk down on his own. Now she was doing her best to track her man.
In her hand she held what looked like a smart phone. It was a secure tracking device, picking up a coded signal from a chip in Andrew’s body, implanted four years ago, unbeknownst to him, during a routine surgery, before he went deep undercover. For each agent, the chip was placed in a different location, based on body type, gender, and height. Flint never told her agents when she had them implanted or where the device was. Of course, the Agency didn’t tell their agents many things. For their own protection.
The display showed latitude and longitude coordinates. A digital compass changed slightly every few seconds. They ha missed Andrew on the beach by an hour. Since then he’d been drifting southwest with the current and the wind. If he’d had a motor, it had long since died. He was under the power of the elements. Which were about to get nasty.
Flint spoke into her headset to the pilot as they flew swiftly along the shoreline.
“He’s a few miles out, south, southwest, based on this calculation. Can you make it?”
“Sure can.”
The helicopter veered sharply away from the shoreline and headed out over the Gulf of Thailand. It traveled over open water, a quarter mile above the sea, to avoid the mist kicked up by the heaving whitecaps.
There were almost no boats out, as fishermen, men who live and die by the sea, had called it a day, with the typhoon predicted to hold sustained winds of up to 150 mph. It was not a time to be on the water.
Flint calculated that Andrew had been out there for 9 hours. She felt both guilt and anxiety. She’d put him in this position. She should have done better due diligence on this entire operation.
She watched the tracking device: It showed Andrew about three miles off shore in the Gulf of Thailand.
She looked out the window at the choppy sea below them. Angry waves grew bigger. She hoped wherever Andrew was, he was afloat. And alive.
*******
Andrew had slept deeply. Bound and tied, he’d tried to stay awake but the fatigue and rocking waves had lulled him to sleep. When he woke, he was soaking wet and freezing, in three inches of water that had seeped into the hole in the hull. Andrew wondered how it was possible to be cold in an equatorial climate. But he was.
He was also stiff from lying in the same position for hours. Heang had tied him underneath the front and back seat slats, as if he were to be roasted on a spit. As best he could, Andrew stretched, his hips achy, his calves cramped.
Stretched out to full length, Andrew’s legs reached to the end of the dinghy. His bare feet, pointed, reached the hole through which seawater was splashing.
He poked his big toe into the drilled hole, wedging himself into a secure position. The seepage stopped. Andrew sighed. Well, that’s one problem solved. He’d bought himself time. Not a lot, not with the storm. But some time.
He started working on the bindings on his wrists.
*******
The weather grew worse farther out to sea. Rain plastered the windows. Heavy winds stirred the already frenzied sea. It was nearly impossible to see, even with the spotlight shining down from the helicopter.
Flint peered out of the window at the churning sea but could discern nothing in the dark. The pilot was the first to see the boat.
“There!”
The pilot sighted the boat about a hundred off. The helo drew closer and Flint pressed her nose against the glass. Andrew was one of her best. She didn’t want to lose him.
Through the mist, she could see the white bobbing dinghy, drifting with the current. It was half-full of water and would soon sink.
Most importantly, she could see Andrew wasn’t in it. She checked her tracker, which she’d forgotten once they’d spotted the boat. Sure enough, Andrew was on the move.
“It’s too rough now, we have to turn back,” the pilot said, as he turned the helicopter back toward shore.
Flint swore
under her breath and nodded. She looked at her tracker. He was out there, somewhere.
Chapter 32
A brash Cambodian fisherman, who believed his boat unsinkable, steered his fishing boat through the night and surging seas of the Gulf of Thailand. Over many beers, on evenings in Sihanoukville bars, he would brag to his fisherman friends that there was no storm his boat could not vanquish. So far he had been right.
It wasn’t much to look at, a wooden junk like many others. But it was solid and tended to with love. It had been his father’s boat before him.
The fisherman had one net still out and then he would call it a day. As he pulled the net in, which was filled to his delight with flapping fish churned up from the storm, he spotted in the water near the boat, lit from the spotlight on his net, white limbs slicing through the waves. He thought it was an albino octopus caught in the maelstrom. Then he saw a man’s head bob up between waves, and after a few moments, one of the white arms grabbed onto the boat’s edge, the hand gripping the wooden railing. The whole man followed the hand, as the man pulled himself up on to the boat. He stood, naked, staring at the fisherman. He was white as a bone and breathing hard.
“Help me.” The man slumped against the side of the boat, exhausted.
The fisherman had seen many American movies and he was especially fond of Meryl Streep films. His English was from Hollywood films bought for pennies at the local market.
“Yes. Yes.” The fisherman left his net and the flapping fish hoping to return to the sea. He gave Andrew water from his own bottle then rummaged inside the small cabin for an old woven blanket. Some calm nights he slept on the open water, under the sky. The night air always carried a chill that permeated the bones.
As he wrapped Andrew in the rough blanket, he saw the red marks on Andrew’s wrists and ankles. They were not deep, rope burns only, and would be fine from the salt water. But a man lost at sea for any amount of time is a man at risk of dying, from exposure, dehydration, and hypothermia.
“Here. Drink. More.” Andrew drank again deeply and then proceeded to throw up much of what he had swallowed.
“Good, good.” The fisherman said, “Salt water. Good on outside, bad on inside.” He gave the bottle again to Andrew. “Drink. Again.”
As Andrew drank the water, wiped his mouth, the fisherman started his engine.
“How far are we from shore?”
“Far. You strong swimmer. But not that strong. Where is boat?”
Andrew leaned his head back against the wood. “By now, at the bottom of the sea.” The fisherman, pondering this, felt proud of his small but seaworthy craft. He patted the boat’s side.
The winds continued to pick up and a gust knocked the boat hard. Andrew caught himself, his hand reaching for an edge. The fisherman simply adjusted his stance. His sea legs were on auto-pilot.
Andrew wrapped the blanket around himself tighter. “I need to get to shore. To Cambodia. Can you take me there?”
“Yes, yes. We go now. I take you.” The fisherman studied his unexpected passenger. “Kampot?” Most tourists wanted to go to Kampot.
“No. Anywhere but Kampot.” Kampot was the site from which he had been launched.
“OK. I take you Sihanoukville. Very fun. Many parties. Much drinking.” The fisherman opened the engine and the boat picked up speed. He pointed at the heavy night skies.
“Now, the storm comes.”
Andrew looked out into the night. “Yes. It does.”
Chapter 33
Andrew stood on the edge of the clearing, leaning against a thick tree. The rain pelted down in the thin morning light, pushing its way through the jungle canopy and pattering on the dense leaves. The sun, thwarted by the thick low clouds of the fast-moving storm, was nowhere to be seen. It would be a dark day.
The camp in front of Andrew consisted of five wood-framed huts with thatched roofs and walls. Tall straight trees surrounding the clearing swayed in the heavy wind. Light shone from the largest hut. Several men stood under a large tree smoking. In a rustic bamboo stable by the edge of the forest near Andrew, animals shifted about in the darkness, waiting to be fed.
Andrew counted ten motorcycles. And the helicopter he’d passed a quarter mile back could hold one person, maybe two.
Socheat’s translation of Hakk’s treatise had listed three training camps. Like Ben, Andrew had stumbled on the first camp in Mondulkiri and visited the second in Kampot, hoping to talk to Hakk. Now, deep in the Cardamom mountains, site of the last stand of the Khmer Rouge, Andrew knew he had found the main camp, Hakk’s stronghold. While the other two were transient facilities, here, he’d seen water cisterns on the mountain-side, large storage containers, probably with food and weaponry, and a helicopter pad. This is where Hakk was holed up and where he planned to remain.
While the weather had helped his approach, masking the sound of the helo he’d commandeered from the Sihanoukville airport, now the rain pelted down on him. His clothes, borrowed from a drunk Australian who’d been walking on the Sihanoukville beach at 5:00 AM, were soaked and plastered to his body.
He had landed on the only open spot he could find, a deserted road about a mile away, and had snaked his way up the mountain, following a trail worn by animals wild and domestic moving over the hill. Several times, thinking he heard voices, he had faded off the trail into the trees. But it had been only the wind.
The camp was far from all towns, the closest village a rugged twenty-mile motorcycle ride away and that was nothing more than a watering hole, offering only warm beer and weak pot. The only people who would pass this way were locals, farmers who wanted no trouble. Certainly, there were no tourists.
*******
Hakk’s men had arrived an hour earlier, one from each province, driving the long distance from their homelands, where they themselves had their own men, believers waiting for the word. This group had met only once before, a year previous, to set things in motion. Tonight, they had greeted each other with deep bows and quiet words, waiting for their leader to summon them. It was a solemn and sacred time.
Andrew watched as Hakk appeared in the doorway and called from the hut, yelling over the sound of the noisily swaying trees, for his men. He was ready. Cigarettes were extinguished, feet shuffled and the men fell into a line, moving toward the light. In the dark, Andrew waited.
*******
Inside the hut, Hakk stood at the head of the wooden table in the center of the room, staring at a large map on the wall to his right. The room was lit by oil lanterns, one positioned in each corner and another hanging from a pole that ran from one end of the ceiling to the other.
On the table, squat white candles smoked, their flames casting shadows on the men’s faces as they assembled and sat, four seats on each side. The seat at the head of the table was vacant.
The men, all in their fifties, dark hair graying at the temples, were dressed identically in black. While it was not evident from their stony faces, they were the type of men for whom hate came easy, like breathing. It was all they had known. As with Hakk, it was the only sustenance they needed, its power sustaining as they steeped in bitter anger, watching as the world pressed forward, into an open, welcome, connected future.
Hakk had devoted years searching for this small band of men, visiting villages and towns in distant provinces, asking quiet questions in subdued corners, leaving a trail for his brothers-in-arms to find him. He had known there must be others like him, who had stood guard decades ago, like him, on rice paddies now forgotten. Who longed too to see the work continue.
The men, hatred stirred awake, came to him from the remotest corners of the countryside, with hopes that their collective dreams would restore order to the world gone mad.
Hakk held his arms behind his back and breathed in, his shoulders rising with the inhale. He waited. On the table, his satellite phone rang and he grabbed it to answer.
“Jah. Jah.” Yes. Yes. OK.
He hung up and nodded at the men. Their faces showed v
isible relief. The loss of the Siem Reap bomb had disrupted the initial plan, but now things were back on schedule.
Hakk placed the pin in Siem Reap.
“Now we begin.”
As Hakk spoke, his voice quiet, his advisors leaned forward to hear, their faces open and reverent, their eyes unblinking. They watched his lips as his words unveiled a new world for them. For their country. For the world.
What he said made their heartbeats quicken.
*******
Andrew had watched the men enter the hut. He noted that only one man stood guard in the doorway, the guard Heang from the beach. From his location, Andrew could see into the hut through a window and he watched Hakk talking. He wanted to get closer.
He approached the stables from the back. From this location, he could smell that the stalls needed a good cleaning and some fresh hay. He stepped to the front to see the offending creatures.
The stable revealed a large gray beast, whose left eye watched Andrew, transfixed. The elephant was the largest Andrew had seen. It huffed at him, a question. She and her companion had been fed, an extra large bucket each, and so were content and untroubled by their visitor. Watching her, Andrew christened her Jane and her son Dick. Andrew was about to move in to the stable, as figured it would be a good place to watch the action, out of the rain, when he heard voices.
He slipped back behind the stable and watched Heang approach, carrying something in his hand. Andrew assumed it was a gun. He didn’t know if he should bolt for the cover of the jungle or stay put.
Heang went right into the stable, where Andrew could no longer see him. He could hear Heang speaking in quiet Khmer, in a gentle sing song tone. Andrew ventured closer to the stable window to peer in.
Heang was sitting on a plastic bucket feeding the vast elephant grapes from his hand. He caressed the large animal’s face and sang a lullaby while Jane ate.
After a few minutes, snack time over, Heang patted the animal’s trunk, brushed off his trousers and walked back to the hut. He wiped his feet on the dirt outside and walked in.
