Kasper’s proposal: to ford the little river under cover of darkness and climb up the bank on the Thai side. Had he been alone, he wouldn’t have thought about it for a minute. But he was with Clancy.
Uncle Clancy.
His white beard, that pensive air.
“Are you crazy?” was the American’s response. “Didn’t you say the riverbank is mined?”
“There may be a mine or two, yes. You just have to pay attention. I talked to a smuggler friend of mine. He showed me where we should cross.”
“You cross through the mines. I’m strolling over the bridge tomorrow morning. It’ll be like taking a walk. Then we can swim in the sea off Phuket Island instead of this stinking gutter.”
They arise at dawn. From a public telephone, they call their employee and explain where he can pick up the CR-V. They tell him how to get rid of the guns they’ve hidden in it. Then they have breakfast, exchange a few words. Just the indispensable ones. They say their good-byes.
“Until we meet on the other side,” says Kasper.
“See you soon,” says Clancy with a nod.
—
Looked at from the Cambodian riverbank, the bridge seemed like a joke. See how perspective alters things, Kasper thinks. A few meters, and everything’s totally changed.
His passport passes from hand to hand. Four or five times. Back and forth, like a game. Then the first border guard points his pistol at Kasper’s face. Behind him, other guards have their weapons leveled.
They bring him to an office with a table, three chairs, and a poster displaying medical and health information.
Kasper tries hard not to assign blame, but without success. Swimming in the sea off Phuket Island. Fuck you, Clancy, he thinks, while the Cambodian soldiers search him and take everything he has. They lead him to another room in the guard post. This one’s empty except for a couple of plastic chairs. The soldiers tell him, “You wait here.”
After less than an hour, the door opens again and in he comes, the optimistic American. They detained him the same way: passport, two pissy questions, and a pistol aimed at his face.
Clancy sits down on a chair next to Kasper and plays the role of the red, white, and blue veteran. He says, “Maybe it’s better this way. We’ll clear up everything and go back to Phnom Penh.”
“Is that a hope or a prediction?” Kasper asks.
“It’s a prediction. You’ll see.”
“A prediction. Right.”
Kasper knows that the “predictions” Americans make sometimes get into ugly collisions with reality. The optimistic approach is endearing; unfortunately, however, it doesn’t pay. But that’s how the Americans are. They take on enemies they consider undersized weaklings who turn out to be rather more difficult than they figured.
Kasper knows Americans well. His father’s a half-American Tuscan born in Memphis, Tennessee. Half of Kasper’s family lives in St. Louis; most of his military and pilot training took place in the States. He loves everything about America, or almost everything. Therefore his old friend Clancy’s optimism really pisses him off.
Suppose they’re in real trouble—the worst kind of trouble, the definitive kind?
They sit for a few hours in the stifling little room with its barred windows and its reek of smoke and frontier. It’s a hole, this post on the Thai border. The Cambodian guards keeping an eye on them chat among themselves. And wait.
Three in the afternoon. The door of the room swings open and five men in civilian clothes come in. They’re Cambodians, and they’re armed. They know perfectly well who they’re dealing with. Kasper’s immobilized at once. No martial arts or any of the rest of his repertoire. With Clancy, things are easier.
They sit Kasper and Clancy down and bind them. Chains around ankles and arms, wrists tied tightly behind their backs.
These five are professionals.
Kasper recognizes a couple of them from the Marksmen Club, the Phnom Penh shooting range where he habitually spends a lot of his time. Now he realizes that he and Clancy are not in deep shit.
It’s worse than that.
The five men are from the Combat Intelligence Division, or CID, a very special task force that takes on some very special assignments. These are people who don’t waste time. Five sons of bitches ready for anything. There are probably five more of them outside this room.
The unit’s veterans are all former Khmer Rouge. The younger guys live on myths of the past, of a ferocious competence that’s earned the CID a pretty grim reputation over the years. In many cases, they operate in close collaboration with the American embassy, which is to say the CIA’s Indochinese field office.
Leave town now.
Too late, dear Senator Bun Sareun.
—
There are ten of them altogether. Kasper called it right.
Dark suits, dark glasses: they look like the Blues Brothers, Cambodian version. Their weapons are Smith & Wessons, Colt .45s, AK-74s, and AK-47s. Their vehicles are two black SUVs, already loaded with the prisoners’ “personal effects.” The bags have been overturned, their contents scattered about, the $70,000 removed without trace. In this situation, that’s just a detail.
The detail that will save his life.
“You’re under arrest for tax crimes,” the unit commander announces. He’s Lieutenant Darrha, a thirtyish mixed-race Cambodian whose aspect is both martial and diabolical. Tall, sturdy, dark-featured, with something European about him, and those eyes: like deep wells, full of threatening promises.
“Tax crimes against the Cambodian state,” Darrha specifies.
“Let me see that in writing,” Kasper says.
The response is immediate: a kick to the pit of his stomach. He leans forward, bent in half, trying to breathe.
“Could you read that all right?” says the leader of the Blues Brothers.
They fling Kasper and Clancy into different SUVs and drive off.
Before he loses sight of Clancy, Kasper manages to exchange a glance with him. The American looks very frightened. He knows as well as Kasper, even better than Kasper, who’s taking them for a ride. And Clancy too is probably thinking that this ride could be his last.
They don’t remove Kasper’s chains. They don’t allow him to sit more comfortably. They offer no water, not even a little. It’s been hours since Kasper had anything to drink, and that room the border guards kept them in was an oven. By contrast, the vehicle he’s traveling in now is an icebox. The air-conditioning’s cranked all the way up. The two-way radio coughs and hacks. His five captors chat in Cambodian and look at him.
They look
