The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

‘No!’ Ny turned on her mother, eyes burning, and spoke rapidly in her native tongue. Then she turned to Elliot. ‘I go with my mamma to Phnom Penh.’

Elliot looked at McCue, who shook his head. ‘What you gonna do, Elliot? Tie them up and carry them to Thailand?’

A rustle in the undergrowth brought both men sharply back to their present danger. Elliot swung his automatic round as Slattery crawled through the thick bank of ferns overhead to drop down to the river bed beside them. He was breathing hard and sweating. ‘Khmer Rouge,’ he whispered. ‘A dozen, maybe more. Coming this way.’

‘Move!’ Elliot hissed, and he pulled Ny roughly to her feet. ‘Which way?’ he asked Slattery.

Slattery nodded up ahead. ‘Better stick to the river bed.’

‘Okay, we’ll follow you.’

Slattery led them, through patches of dappled moonlight, at a half-run, half-crouch, east along the stony bed of the dry stream, ferns and creepers snagging on clothes and hands and faces. Serey stumbled and fell several times, and McCue half dragged, half carried her for several hundred metres before the strain on his arms began to take its toll. He slumped back against the bank, and damp, crumbling earth showered down over both of them. Beads of sweat left tracks in the dirt on his face. Elliot and Ny caught up and stopped. McCue caught the look on Elliot’s face. ‘Shit, man,’ he gasped. ‘Got to take a breather. The old lady ain’t got the legs for this, and I can’t carry her for ever.’ Elliot nodded and whistled softly into the darkness ahead. After a few moments, Slattery came back along the stream bed to join them.

‘What’s up, chief?’

‘We’re going to have to lie up for a while. Check our position.’

Slattery nodded and slipped over the north bank and melted silently away through the trees. Perhaps two kilometres to the west came the distant sound of automatic gunfire. Eight or ten bursts. And Elliot knew that the killing of those left behind had begun.

Slattery took a wide sweep through the trees, north then west, before crossing to the south side of the dry stream and turning east again to head back towards the others. There was no sign of the soldiers he had seen earlier. Perhaps they had headed west, back towards the commune in an attempt to cut them off. He heard sporadic fire from that direction and felt sick at the thought of those poor shambling creatures, unarmed and defenceless, being cut down as they made their hopeless breaks for freedom. They had not asked to be set free. They had not deserved to be enslaved. Perhaps death was now the only freedom they would ever know, their only possible escape.

Slattery’s few moments of lapsed concentration were fatal. He missed the shadows that slipped darkly through the trees away to his left. The snap of a twig crashed into his thoughts, through the haze of pain that came from the ache in his gut. But that split-second warning was not enough. He turned just in time to see the flash of an AK-47 and feel the pain of its burst of bullets as they tore through his left thigh and knee, shattering bones and arteries. The leg buckled under him and he fell face-first into the damp earth and humus. And he thought he smelled death in its bitter odour. The pain, at first, was crippling, and he found he could not move. He heard footsteps approach cautiously through the undergrowth. He cursed his careless stupidity, his lack of professionalism. His cancer seemed such a small thing now, and he thought, in that moment, that he loved life more dearly than he had ever done before.

The initial, all-consuming pain receded now before a wave of warmth that spread upwards through him from his shattered leg. He raised his head a little and saw his automatic lying two feet away, where it had fallen. He reached forward to grasp it, but only in his mind. His body would not respond. He managed to incline his head to his left and saw six or seven figures in black pyjamas approaching, AK-47s held at the ready, dark eyes burning with a triumph fuelled by fear and confusion. They stopped, no more than two or three metres away, and looked at the prone figure on the ground. One of them stepped forward and raised his automatic. Slattery watched the barrel lift to point at him, like the finger of God passing judgement. And the sentence was death. Even in these last seconds it struck him as odd that he should think now of God, when he had not thought of God in all the years of his life. He closed his eyes as the sound of automatic fire exploded in the dark.

So this was death. He felt confused. It seemed no different from life. The pain, the heat rising in his body, the smell of the forest. He opened his eyes to see four Khmer Rouge soldiers lying dead and bleeding only a few feet away. In his confusion he thought he saw others running away through the trees. Another burst of fire brought two of them crashing down. A third swung around, returning a swift burst, before vanishing into the night.

A hand pulled Slattery gently over on to his back, and he found himself looking up into Elliot’s grim, smeared face. Slattery grinned feebly. ‘Strewth, chief,’ he whispered, ‘you took your bloody time.’

*

Elliot jumped down between McCue and the two women, and lowered the now unconscious Slattery from his shoulder into the bed of the dry stream. ‘Tourniquet, quick!’ There was an urgency in his voice that McCue had not heard before. His face and shirt were dark with Slattery’s blood, and McCue wondered, briefly, if it was tears that glazed his eyes. But the thought did not linger. He unsheathed his knife and expertly cut away the blood-sodden trouser leg above the wounds, peeling it slowly back to reveal the shattered