I had seen the leopard again: that was his territory down there where I'd seen him before. And ten minutes ago I'd watched two cobras weaving slowly out of a cleft in the rocks a few feet away, presumably a mated pair, one larger than the other, their scales shimmering in the sunlight. They had sensed me, and for a while had become still, their tongues flicking to analyze my odours and my body-heat; had I been a vole or a muskrat I wouldn't have lived.
At noon I drank some of the water I'd bought in the market on my way from the safe-house; it was warm and unrefreshing but I took in half a litre to prevent dehydration.
Three shots… There'd been a lot of time for thinking today, though none of it, in this heat, had been very structured. But the three shots had interested me because they'd been from two different guns, and Gabrielle had told me the KR was dead. I hadn't asked her any more about it when I was leaving the hospital because she'd been in pain and needed sleep, so all I had was a handful of scenarios: Gabrielle had got in the way of a stray bullet when a KR and someone else had exchanged shots, and she'd seen the KR killed; a KR had seen her with her camera and decided to shoot her as an undesirable foreign journalist, and someone else had killed him in her defence; for some reason she herself had been carrying a gun and had used it when she'd been fired on.
The shots had been exchanged in a definite sequence: replaying the sound of them in my mind I remembered that Gun A had fired twice and Gun B only once, in the sequence A-B-A, which would match two of those scenarios. But anyway she would tell me what had happened, the next time we met. Or perhaps she wouldn't… I knew so little about Gabrielle Bouchard, except that in her face I had come to recognize, even with those blue Caucasian eyes, the face of Cambodia, of courage, endurance, and suffering. I would have been attracted to her by her looks and her nature alone, but there was this extra dimension: seeing the bullet-scarred walls and the riven palm-trees and the legless children in the streets I had begun to ache for this small, tormented country, and also for Gabrielle.
High noon and the heat poured from the molten heights of the sky and my bush shirt was dark with sweat, the second water bottle empty and the field-glasses hot to the touch, and then movement came again and I shifted onto my elbows and got into focus and watched the camouflaged staff car as it climbed the mountain track from the camp through the shimmering heat waves, the glass of its headlamps flashing as it bounced over rough ground, stones flying from under the tyres. It looked like the one I'd tracked here from the town.
Two men, both sitting in the front, their faces blurring as the vehicle neared and I over-corrected the focus and then got the sharpness back, the driver's face unfamiliar, the other man's recognizable, I thought, as Colonel Choen's, the eyes not quite balanced, the mouth drawn down, censuring all mankind. Then as the staff car turned off the track onto the major road I saw the emblem pinned to the side of his red checked krama; from this distance I couldn't make out if it were the one I'd seen before in the detention cell, but I decided the odds were good enough, and within a kilometre I was keeping station in the Mine Action van, half that distance behind.
The target drove straight through Pouthisat, crossing the railway and turning east, passing the Hotel Lafayette, not stopping at the building where Choen had stopped before, and when the airfield sign came up I knew there wasn't going to be any information for Pringle, other than that I was right: Colonel Choen had been visiting the KR camp and was now flying out again. There might have been a chance for me to get close to him again if I could have caught him somewhere distanced from his escort, and that was why I'd spent half the bloody day lying on my stomach watching the local fauna: we'd got nothing for London so far, in spite of what Pringle said, and I was looking for a breakthrough, just one small bloody breakthrough was all I asked, for God's sake, chopper in the sky, there was a chopper lifting above the sugar palms in the east, and as the staff car turned into the freight area the Kamov KA-26 made its descent, the same aircraft that had brought Choen here two days ago, standard military camouflage, the Khmer Rouge shuttle from Phnom Penh.
I rolled the Mine Action van between two hangars facing away from the apron and pulled up and switched off and watched the outside mirrors, waiting for the final scrap of information that would soon become available: would Colonel Choen be flying south-east towards the capital or west towards the main guerrilla base across the mountains?
He was out of the staff car now, standing with his escort and waiting for the chopper to land, dust and heat waves blowing across the apron in the draught from the rotors, a foam cup bowling along the ground as the undercarriage took the shock and the pilot cut the engine and Choen went on standing there, not going towards the chopper even when the door swung open.
A man showed there, looking around him for a moment and then dropping to the apron, seeing Colonel Choen and going across to him in a crouching walk through the draught from the rotors, smoothing his hair back and hitching his briefcase higher under his arm, fairly tall, a light grey European suit with an inch of white cuff showing and a pocket handkerchief displayed, a pair of handsome tan-coloured brogues — and now a smile for Choen as the colonel came forward to meet him, both men giving a perfunctory bow as they shook hands, the pilot coming across to the staff car with a suitcase, presumably the visitor's.
Flying, then, neither south-east to the capital nor west to the guerrilla camp across the mountains, no information on that. Information, instead, on this.
I waited until the staff car was through the gates to the perimeter track before I started up, the chopping of the Kamov's rotors echoing from the hangars as it took off again and I moved the van to within a hundred yards of the target vehicle on the curving track and then dropped back to keep station.
The town was dead now as we drove through it; the heat at this hour filled the streets. Bicycles leaned at doorways; a dog sprawled asleep in a patch of damp earth below a water pump; the remains of a chicken coloured the ground, its blood marking the track of the wheel that had crushed it.
They were both sitting in the back of the staff car, Choen and his visitor: I could see their heads through the rear window, leaning together in conversation until they reached the Hotel du Lac, where the car pulled in.
I was in the lobby by the time the colonel's escort was bringing in the visitor's baggage. There was good cover here: the balustrade of the staircase, three potted palms and a fluted column, and I was within earshot of the two men as they took the stairs to the next floor, the visitor with the briefcase still under his arm and Choen carrying a worn leather attache case. Both were talking in French, the colonel haltingly, the visitor more easily but with a Russian accent, so that I knew that in waiting out the hot, jading and seemingly unprofitable hours of this day we had arrived at a breakthrough.