the speed limit, that’s for sure. Kasper thinks he could try something if he had on a pair of simple handcuffs and his feet were free. But the men escorting him think so too. His chains make any movement impossible. The pain they’re causing is already torture.
After two hours of travel, he can’t feel his joints anymore. His condition has moved well beyond pain.
Lieutenant Darrha’s cell phone rings. He answers and speaks in English, nervously stroking his Kalashnikov. His tone is that of a man who’s receiving orders, a man obliged to give explanations. The prisoner’s still alive, yes. They’re taking him to Phnom Penh, he explains, relaying where they are and how far they have to go. Then he stops talking. He listens. He signals to the driver to slow down a little. Every now and then he emits sounds but doesn’t say a word.
When the call is over, Darrha murmurs something in Cambodian. His words scratch the silence like scraped glass. He turns off the radio and points to some indeterminate spot ahead of them. The driver slows, turns on his hazard lights, comes to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Kasper can sense, a short distance behind them, the glimmer of headlights: the other SUV, still tagging along.
Kasper hopes Clancy’s better off than he is.
Some of the guards ask Darrha questions and obtain answers that don’t seem to meet with general approval. The nervousness is obvious now. Kasper tries to guess the meaning of the discussion, but the Cambodian language is a mystery to him, even in its intonations and cadences. What sounds like friendly mewing can be a curse. Or a death sentence.
In any case, what he thinks he’s understood from the conversation is that the telephone call has altered the program. The Cambodians exchange a few clipped sentences and then fall silent. Nobody’s laughing anymore.
Darrha grabs the assault rifle he’s holding between his knees. In “full auto” mode, the AK-47 will fire 750 rounds per minute. But only one would be enough to do the job on me, Kasper thinks. Darrha says something to the two men sitting on either side of the prisoner and the left door opens. “Out,” they order him.
Kasper gives it a try, but his legs are like hardened plaster. They push him out. He rolls around on the roadside. Grass and mud. The evening has the scent of rural Cambodia; the transition from conditioned air to tropical heat closes his windpipe. Or maybe what takes his breath away is his awareness that this isn’t a courtesy stop at some service area. They tell him to get up. On his feet, right away. Kasper complies slowly.
“Walk straight ahead,” Lieutenant Darrha orders him.
Now it’s not so hard to guess the significance of Darrha’s English telephone conversation. Kasper takes a few steps, the lieutenant right behind him.
“That money. Whose is it?”
“It’s mine.”
“You have more?”
Kasper sees a ray of hope. He recognizes it in Darrha’s question, in those few words of common, utterly normal greed.
More money.
He decides to bet everything on that slim possibility.
“I have much more money, yes. But not here.”
“So you’re rich? Where’s your money?”
“My family is rich. Very rich.”
“Can they pay for you?”
“Yes, they can pay. They can pay a lot.”
“Okay, on your knees.”
The source of the sound Kasper hears is indisputably the cocking handle on Darrha’s AK-47. It’s ready to fire. What the fuck, Kasper thinks, all those questions and now he’s going to waste me?
And there it is, the acid taste; it fills his mouth, fills his throat. His nose too. Suddenly, unmistakably. The body has instinctive responses. The animal that’s about to die secretes fluids and smells that have nothing spiritual about them. Fear accompanies us from birth and knows when its moment has come.
If he’s going to die, he’s got only a few seconds left.
Kasper can’t hear the sound the CID officer makes when he dials a number on his cell phone, but he hears him talking. In English: “So we proceed?” There’s a pause, then he says “Okay” two or three times, and then, “Okay, listen.”
The burst of fire from a Kalashnikov is a sound Kasper has never heard from the perspective of the person being slaughtered. He flinches as the 7.62-caliber rounds whiz by, a meter over his head. Fear and the force of the blast push him down. He ends up face-first on the ground. The bullets fly through the darkness.
“Let’s go,” Darrha says, putting the cell phone back in its holder.
They put Kasper back in the automobile and start off again. Now the five Cambodian Blues Brothers are laughing. They’re all happy. Much happier than before.
3
Americans
CID Barracks, Preah Norodom Boulevard, Phnom Penh, CambodiaMonday, April 7, 2008
He has identified the target.
The military column is moving slowly along the unpaved road. Jeeps and armored vehicles, some trucks carrying troops. He makes a sweeping turn and settles in with the sun behind him. The column hasn’t spotted him yet. He goes into a sudden dive, 300 knots, speed brake extended. He gets the target in his sights, arms the 68 mm. underwing rockets and the two nose cannons of his Aermacchi MB-326 Impala. The strafing run will begin in a few seconds.
But he knows he won’t fire his weapons.
He’s not going to complete his mission.
He’s dreaming.
It’s a strange sensation, a feeling of clearheaded, fully aware unconsciousness. It’s like when he was a little boy and he’d have long, long, convoluted nightmares, and he’d think, all right, now I’m waking up. But he wouldn’t wake up at all. Wrapped in a placenta of viscid, suffocating inertia, he’d remain in his nightmare, weltering among specters until someone or something finally dragged him out of the night.
Now the situation is reversed. Now he’d like to stay where he is, in his dream of a past war, and avoid the horrors of his waking present. The nightmare’s waiting for him after his sleeping is done, out there in the real world. Here he’s a fighter pilot in the sky over Africa. The armored column is flying Angolan colors, but its armament is Soviet. Kasper’s fighting for South Africa, and his weapons are Italian, French, and naturally American. He finds himself in one of the many “dirty little wars” the two great power blocs are waging against each other, moves on the global chessboard. He wants to complete his mission. To keep flying and never come back.
The sounds he hears aren’t antiaircraft fire. They’re his dream ending.
He’s a light sleeper. There’s not enough time to turn back and attempt a landing. The airplane dissolves. So does his dream.
He reenters the nightmare.
—
