The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

Elliot was uneasy, disconcerted by their gaze. He had felt eyes like these on him before. But it was only now, for the first time in his life, that he realized what it was in these eyes that so troubled him. It was an emptiness. Where there’s no hope, what else could there be? It was a look he and the others had seen for more than sixteen years in the eyes that looked back at them from their shaving mirrors each morning. Strange, he had never thought of soldiers as victims before. Soldiers fought, lived or died, won or lost. These, these children, they were the real victims of war. Yet he knew that he, too, somewhere, at some time, had become a victim. He looked away, seeing only himself reflected in the dull stares. Ferguson shouted at the kids and waved an arm. But they continued to stand watching, unmoved.

*

It was dark in the huts after the glare of the sun. The air was fetid. Rows of makeshift beds, groups of ragged refugees, sometimes whole families camped in the gloom, eating, sleeping, dying there. The food dished out by Van Saren’s thugs was never quite enough, the medical services provided by the overstrained relief agencies at best inadequate. Prompted by the threats of Ferguson, often translated by his indifferent rifle-toting deputy, they told their stories. Elliot had wanted to ask questions – numbers of Khmer Rouge, the lie of the land, roads, rivers. But all he could do was listen, silenced by the simplicity of the narratives, the unemotional, undramatized pictures of hell painted in single bold brushstrokes.

One man sat on his own, squatting on the filthy blanket that covered his bed. His hair was matted, his face blank, his eyes dead. Ferguson’s deputy barked at him in Cambodian. The man ignored him and looked at Elliot. ‘I speak English,’ he said. ‘Are you another newspaper man?’

Elliot shook his head. ‘Just interested.’

‘No one is interested without a reason.’

Elliot felt rebuked, though there was no hint of it in the man’s voice. He acknowledged the truth. ‘I have a reason.’

The man shrugged. He didn’t want to know what it was. He had no cause to be interested. Ferguson sat on the bed opposite, picking his teeth with a bamboo splinter. ‘Get on with it!’

Elliot caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and saw McCue standing there. Ferguson glanced at him with unconcealed hostility. He didn’t like anyone to get the better of him, especially another Yank. ‘Where’s Slattery?’ Elliot asked.

‘Drinking.’ McCue pulled up a broken stool and sat down. ‘Thought I’d listen in.’

‘I ain’t got all day,’ Ferguson snapped. He prodded the refugee with his cane. ‘I told you to get on with it.’

The man shrugged. He told them his name was Chan Cheong and that he was twenty-eight. Elliot was shocked. He would have taken him for forty. ‘I was a truck driver in Lon Nol’s army,’ he said. ‘I lived with my wife, Key, and my two sons, in Phnom Penh. My oldest boy was eight, my youngest not yet two. When the Khmer Rouge came I threw away my uniform and when they emptied the city we took what we could carry and went north.

‘The road was choked with people just like us. Thousands and thousands of them, young and old, sick and dying. When the old and the sick fell in the road the soldiers made their families go on, and if the ones left behind were not dead already, they were shot and pushed to the side of the road or dumped in the fields to rot. That first day there were so many people on the road we covered no more than two or three miles. By the end of the day we had thrown away most of what we had, because it was too heavy to carry. And always the soldiers pushed us with their guns to make us hurry, or fired shots in the air.

‘Every so often there were checkpoints where they asked questions. Endless questions. And those they thought had been soldiers they took away, and made the rest go on. But we knew that the soldiers were shot. For myself, I said I had been a taxi driver and they believed me. They made us walk for days, and we did not dare to stop to rest or sleep. We had to walk through the night and carry our children. Children cannot walk for ever without sleep.

‘After about a week, we reached a town called Kompong Thom. There, a woman I had known in Phnom Penh identified me as a military driver. I said she was lying, but they took me away and made me join a work party of what they called liberated soldiers. We worked until we dropped, every day from first light until well after dark, building a dam. If anyone stopped for a rest he was shot. So for as long as we could stand we worked without stopping.

‘Sometimes they gave us a day off and told us we were invited to a merit festival. But those turned out to be long hours of indoctrination. We had to sit and listen to endless communist slogans blasted out from loudspeakers. The only good thing about the merit festivals was that I had the chance to be with my family again, if only for a few hours.

‘Then one day we were told there was to be a big freedom celebration for all the newly liberated who had arrived from Phnom Penh. We were to wear our best clothes for the occasion, and were taken in buses to a Buddhist temple on the mountain. There were about two hundred of us gathered there. Former soldiers, officers, doctors, nurses, teachers. Everyone was very frightened when they locked us in. But the guards would not answer our questions, telling us only that everything would become clear to us at the