Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  I’m still staring at him, and he seems now to focus on my face, and actually to register its expression. He raises his eyebrows at whatever it is he sees, shrugs, and sighs. “I only found out about this after Mike had gone in,” he says. “Want you to have that clear, Ray.”

  I’ve drunk too much of his whiskey; my head’s begun to swim. “Isn’t it possible it was true? Maybe she survived after all,” I say.

  He sinks back in his armchair, lying almost prone, legs extended, hands in his pockets. He’s stopped drinking, and when he speaks, his voice has dropped so low I have to strain to hear it.

  “No,” he says. “No. I was up there, Ray, at Aranyaprathet with Aubrey, waiting for her to come through on the radio in those first few days after the Yanks pulled their embassy out: before the Khmer Rouge came into Phnom Penh. She only contacted us twice. The first time was when they were still waiting for the Khmer Rouge, and there wasn’t much to report. She asked Aubrey to get a message to Mike in Saigon, and Aubrey said he would. But he didn’t: I only found that out later. He didn’t want Mike to know he’d recruited her. He got me to lie about it too. The second time she made contact—”

  He stops, and for a moment he doesn’t go on.

  “The second time was when the Khmer Rouge had come into town,” he says. “Her voice had changed; she was frightened.” He draws a hand across his mouth, not looking at me. “What she said was: ‘We’re all being ordered out—out of Phnom Penh. Even the sick have to leave the hospitals. It’s not like you said it would be. The soldiers are very frightening. They’re going to every house in this street. They’ll be here at my uncle’s in a few minutes. What should I do?’ ”

  He pauses.

  “Guess what Uncle Aubrey said? ‘Trust your judgment, my dear. Get through to us again when you can.”’ Suddenly, and with startling crudity, Mills spits sideways on the floor. “I won’t forget what she said then. Wish I bloody could. ‘You’re a fool, Mr. Hardwick. You understood nothing. They’re here. They’re here.’ Then there was some kind of banging noise, and she went off the air. She never came back on again.”

  The rain still lashes the window. We stare at it: our phantom cinema. Then Mills says: “When a certain kind of man’s losing the life he wants, there’s nothing he won’t do to save it. That’s Uncle Aubrey.”

  I find I’m not able to speak. I’m looking at the far-off highway through the window, its blue lights strung across a country of which I know nothing.

  2.

  The Telenews car is a new BMW: roomy, air-conditioned and almost soundless: one of Jim’s perks as bureau chief here. It rolls free of the suburbs of Bangkok in the predawn dark. Out through the windscreen, an occasional house light glimmers.

  It’s still only five o‘clock, and Jim and I are silent, entangled in the last threads of sleep, sitting in the back. Daeng, the Thai driver, is a stocky man of middle age; he lights his first cigarette now, hissing as he draws in smoke, his face reflecting the soft glow from the dashboard. He puts the pack down beside the hand brake, jerks his head at it, and turns half towards us, speaking in a voice that’s hushed in deference to the hour. “Always I have kept a pack there for Mike, when he came up to the border. That way, I would not run short.” He chuckles, and Jim joins in.

  “He never stopped believing he would give up smoking,” Jim says. “And never stopped cadging them.”

  “But he cadged nothing else,” Daeng says.

  “No. He gave things; he didn’t take. That’s the way he was,” Jim says, and I sense that they have said these things many times before: a litany, recited now for my benefit.

  They fall silent for a time, and the car hums on. Then Daeng turns to glance at me. “You think he is still alive, Mr. Barton?”

  “I hope so,” I say.

  “Jim hopes too, and so do I,” Daeng says. “But I am very afraid for him. Where can he be? Very brave, what he did, but not sensible. Inside Cambodia, you know, there is nowhere to hide. The Khmer Rouge occupy every village. Everywhere you go in the country, they are there: this is what I am told.”

  “Mike’s alive,” Jim says.

  His tone is quiet, but as always it discourages speculation. After another silence he turns to me. His face has a stony look, in the dimness: one that’s only appeared since yesterday. “But I’ve been thinking I should do something about Hardwick,” he says. “Maybe put a contract on him, when he comes up to Bangkok again. It’s pretty cheap to do, here.”

  I look at him to see if he’s serious. “No. Never mind,” he says. “What would be the use? Mike will be found, I know it. And maybe Ly Keang too.”

  We’re driving northeast, and now streaks of pink have begun to appear in the sky up ahead.

  “Getting light,” Daeng says.

  The sun rises ahead of us down the shining asphalt highway, and the calm Thai countryside is springing into being around the car. Electric pylons march across a wide green plain, receding to blue mountains in the east. Bean trees and casuarinas grow among fields of tapioca; sleeping houses pass, their Siamese eaves curved upwards; a Buddhist pagoda rises on top of a hill of white rock. Mike must have seen these images every week, riding towards his window on Cambodia. And suddenly, as though picking up a faint radio transmission, I feel his longing.

  Yesterday in the Newsroom, Harvey Drummond dwelt on that longing with some eloquence, leaning forward as if I were in a witness box, one finger pointing, wanting to make me see.

  I wonder if you can imagine his desperation, he said. I watched him bottling it up in the Foxhole for nearly a year. He wouldn’t stop searching for her. Every week of this past year, without fail, he’d ride up to those secret Cambodian camps. Jim would give him the use of the Telenews car, and to justify it, Mike went back to film work, acting as a stringer for Telenews, with Daeng working as his soundman. He shot film of Khmer Rouge attacks on Thai villages that were sheltering the refugees; he also did interviews with Chandara and other Free Khmer leaders. But all the time he was looking for Ly Keang. It was like some religious commitment: not to be questioned. If anyone did question it, and suggested that Langford should give up and resign himself, he got angry. One dickhead correspondent in the Foxhole kept insisting that she must be lost, and Mike punched him up—and that wasn’t like Mike.

  Picture it, Harvey said. For a year, he checked every group of Cambodians that escaped over the border—always hoping to find Ly Keang among them. She’d been everything to him: he’d found her rather late in life, and now she was snatched away: locked in that closed country of hers, where these bloody horrors were going on. You see? Do you see, Ray?

  The country’s changed. We’ve had breakfast in a roadside café, and have passed through Aranyaprathet, the principal town of the region. Now we’re getting near to the border of Cambodia.

  The road’s no longer asphalt, and has turned a bright ochre red. We’re coming close to Camp 008, Daeng says, and the BMW rolls through a flat red wasteland that’s waterless and parched and burning, resembling inland Australia. Even the smudges of vegetation here are the juiceless gray-green of desolation.

  We’ve been stopped at a succession of military posts. Coming to this area of the Cambodian refugee camps has needed Thai Government permission, and soldiers have checked our documents at every post. At the last of these, we waited two hours for the invisible commander of the region to sanction our proceeding any further, sitting on wooden benches beside a concrete block-house. The heat had a burning intensity beyond anything I’d experienced, making me grow faint and dizzy; I longed for the air-conditioning of the car.

  Camp 008, the clandestine headquarters of the Free Khmer guerrillas, turns out to be a small primitive settlement of bamboo huts with palm-thatched roofs, crouching in the dry red waste. Palm and banana trees stand stricken in the windless air. Beyond, in the east, lie the hills and mountains of Cambodia: rusty, pale green, then mauve, their peaceful screen hiding the atrocious. Jim and I leave Daeng sitting in the car, and walk down brown g
raveled alleyways that attempt to be streets.

  There’s a reek of open drains; half-naked Khmer children stare and run away from us; dark faces watch us go by, from the secret, dark interiors of earth-floored huts. It’s uncannily quiet here, and the air is heavy with boredom. A light, hot breeze comes up, and lost, black-clad Cambodians drift slowly about the make-believe byways.

  “There’s nothing for them to do,” Jim says. “For a year, they’ve sat here, waiting. Some hope to go to America or Australia. Others wait for the Free Khmer to give them their country back. I think they’ll wait a long time.” He shakes his head, limping jerkily on the gravel.

  At the center of the camp is a makeshift office building: a big, stifling bamboo shed with an earth floor and no fans, since there’s no electric power in the camp. Half a dozen Cambodian clerks sit poring over papers at old wooden desks; one of them gets up and comes across to the bamboo counter. Jim addresses him in French, asking to see Colonel Chandara.

  The clerk looks uneasy. He speaks in French too rapid for me to follow, and Jim turns to me.

  “He says Chandara isn’t here—but I believe he’s lying. Chandara doesn’t see people easily, since he took command of the Free Khmer. He always saw Mike, though. And I believe he’ll see me, if he knows I’m here.” He speaks to the clerk again, repeating his name loudly, his face stern and affronted, and I wonder if this expression has developed since he lost his leg.

  The clerk hesitates; then he says: “Attendez,” and disappears.

  A short time later he comes back, smiling as though he’s achieved something remarkable, and speaks in English. “Colonel Chandara will see you. Please.” He gestures towards the door, and then leads the way.

  We sit down on crude wooden benches at a table with a red-checked cloth: Jim and I on one side, Colonel Chandara on the other. It resembles a conference table; but I suspect it’s also used for dining by the colonel and his troops. There’s a bowl of yellow roses on it, a mug containing pencils, a pad, and some ash trays: nothing else. The roses have come from a garden plot outside, visible through the open door behind us: a tract of biscuit-dry soil behind a picket fence, baking in the immense heat. A young Cambodian soldier in green fatigues stands at attention beside an inner door of the room, trying not to stare at us.

  “I’m so sorry, Jim,” Chandara says. “They didn’t understand who you were. It’s always good to see you.”

  He smiles and shakes our hands, leaning across the table. He too wears green military fatigues, without insignia. He’s much as he appears in the photograph with Mike: thin and fit, with the shock of thick straight hair and black mustache. But the photograph hasn’t conveyed his presence, or the intensity of his eyes, whose deep brown is almost black.

  Jim offers him a packet of Winstons, and Chandara takes one. “We don”t see many of these up here,“ he says, and leans to Jim’s Zippo lighter. Sitting back again, he inhales with open pleasure. ”We don’t see many journalists either. I no longer trust them, Jim: my people are told to keep the wrong sort away. You will know what I mean.“ He looks at me. ”But you and Jim are both welcome, Ray. Jim says that you knew Mike as a boy. That’s enough for me.“

  I thank him, and look about me. The room is long and narrow, and is set up as the office of a military commander, with large maps of the region pinned to the walls. But the house plainly doubles as a dwelling for Colonel Chandara, and perhaps for some of his officers as well. On another wall, there are personal touches: a color photograph of Chandara with his wife and three children; a Cambodian landscape in oils; pictures of Buddhist monks. In a corner, there’s a small shrine, with a statue of the Buddha and a cluster of unlit candles. This is the biggest structure in the camp, but it’s still merely a hut, with an earth floor like the others, and no fans. Like the office we’ve just left, it’s at oven heat, and we mop the sweat from our faces every few minutes. Even Chandara’s face glistens, and there are dark patches of sweat under the arms of his shirt.

  Another young soldier appears through a door behind the colonel, carrying a tray of coffee. Moving with formal care, he sets the cups down around the table. Chandara gives a brief order in Khmer, and both soldiers hurry out. Watching, I try to keep a neutral expression. The carefully contrived formality of the situation, with its maps and conference table and roses, is like a child’s imitation of the adult world. But it’s easy to be amused by the dispossessed, and I feel a quick sense of shame. As I pick up my coffee, I find Chandara looking at me; when he speaks, it seems to be in answer to my thoughts.

  “Few Western journalists want to know about us, Ray,” he says. “And we are often misrepresented. They love to make stories about CIA plots. If only they knew how little the CIA or anyone else will help us. Only Mike Langford told the truth about us.”

  “He always believed in the Khmer Serei,” Jim says.

  “Yes, he believed,” Chandara says.

  He pauses, drawing on his cigarette, his eyes moving away from us; and now a look of sadness comes into his face: he appears to be struggling to mask distress. He releases smoke, and goes on.

  “When I started to form our national liberation front, coming alone to Bangkok, Mike took me into his house, and later made our cause known to the international press.” He looks at me. “You know this, Ray? You know how much he supported us?”

  I say I have some idea.

  “Who will do what Mike did for us? We so badly need good public relations,” Chandara says. He pauses again, his mouth compressed under the mustache. When he continues, his calm, discursive tone seems calculated to distract attention from his emotion.

  “That was what Mike understood,” he says. “That was how he has helped us in this last year. We are now carrying guerrilla warfare thirty kilometers inside the border, but it is only the beginning. We need supplies, intelligence, communications. We need the big powers to believe in us. We must plan three, four, five years ahead; it will take time to win back the countryside. Not many want to fight the nightmare; they are too weak. But we must sacrifice ourselves, as the Communists do, and live as hard as they do. Nothing else will earn us our country back. We lost it through loving luxury. Now—” He spreads his hands, palms upward. “I have sent my wife and children to Bangkok,” he says. “There is nothing else here but the struggle. It’s the only way,”

  He looks at us both as though anticipating questions; but neither of us speaks. I don’t feel hopeful for Chandara and his cause. Prosperous Thailand, with its cars, television, transistor radios and sexual bazaars for tourists, is waiting on his flank; and his people are waiting in their shanties to emigrate to America and Australia. He’ll swelter here on the border with his refugee army, in his bamboo hut with its rose garden and its military maps, attended by his young officers and aides-de-camp, and he’ll probably never give up; but it will all be worked out elsewhere in the end, by people in air-conditioned offices who have no emotional involvement with Cambodia; people who’ll decide its fate with larger aims in mind.

  “Mike helped us all the time,” Chandara is saying. “His warmth and support meant so much to me. He and I were going to write a small book together. He did all these things out of friendship, and because he loved Cambodia.” He drains his coffee cup, and puts it down. He’s sitting very straight, and unnaturally still.

  “Mike was my truest friend,” he says, “Just as he was yours, Jim. I loved him. I trusted him from the day I first met him. My men admired him.” He pauses, looking directly at Jim.

  “But now his luck has gone,” he says. “I know that you want me to discuss how he can be found—but I have to tell you: it can’t be done.” He stops abruptly, and I’m startled to see that his eyes are brimming with tears. Then he says: “It is very hard for me to speak to you about this.”

  He continues to sit motionless, holding the arms of his bamboo chair, his face hard and composed, looking past us out the door, neither indulging his grief nor wiping his tears away.

  Jim has been sitting just
as straight and still as Chandara. Now he leans forward, and I see that his good left foot taps nervously on the earth floor, in its highly polished brown boot. “His luck isn’t gone,” he says. “He isn’t gone, Colonel. We still have to try and find him.”

  But Chandara shakes his head, blinking and clearing his throat. “You will not find him now,” he says. He takes out a handkerchief and wipes his cheeks. “Something has happened since you were here last, Jim. It isn’t good news.” He turns aside, blowing his nose, and then shouts two words in Khmer.

  One of the young soldiers comes in, and salutes. Chandara speaks to him quickly, and the soldier hurries out the front door, disappearing through the rose garden into the white and ochre furnace of the day. Then Chandara looks back at Jim.

  “This week Lay Vora came to us,” he says. “You remember Lay Vora? Mike’s driver?”

  “Of course I remember Vora,” Jim says. “I’ve so often worried about him—and his family too. I had given up hope for them. He’s here? They got away?”

  “He and his wife and small daughter have just come across the border,” Chandara says. “I have sent for him to talk to you. He will tell you about Michael.”

  I lean forward. “He’s seen Mike?”

  Chandara doesn’t reply at first. Then he says: “Yes. But better that he tells you himself. I cannot be the one to tell you.”

  Harvey Drummond has described Vora for me as a man in vigorous middle age, always neat and lively and well dressed. But the small, bent figure that shuffles into the room is that of an old man, and the faded blue shirt, black shorts and rubber shower sandals are the outfit of a street beggar.

  “Vora,” Jim says. He stands up and holds out his arms.

  They embrace, and Vora says in English: “Mr. Jim. It’s so good to see you. They tell me you are here in Thailand.”

  His looks are semi-Caucasian, as seems often to be the case with Cambodians: waving hair, and eyes that are round rather than almond-shaped. Except for the deep brown skin, he could almost be an old Irish-Australian. He’s somehow familiar; and his face is gentle and likable. His hair is still black, but there are white streaks in it, and his skin is very wrinkled. Looking up at Jim with an expression that’s half delighted and half stricken, he has his brows raised high, and this has put a large number of horizontal corrugations across his forehead. Now in his late forties, he appears close to seventy.