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

But they had seen nothing, no sign of human activity or habitation. An eerie calm blanketed the land, unnatural in its stillness.

‘Where is everyone – anyone?’ McCue had muttered under his breath. He was unsettled by the pall of silence, broken only by the gentle put-put of their engine, that hung over them.

With the ending of the day, the heat and humidity had intensified, great dark clouds rolling in from the west to blot out the sky before night fell to cloak them in darkness. Elliot reckoned they were less than an hour upriver from Phnom Penh itself, and they had decided to drop anchor in the lee of the west bank and wait until just before dawn to make their final approach to the city. The rain had started not long after.

Elliot took a slug of beer and checked his watch. Almost half-past ten. It would be a long night, through which the fear of tomorrow would deny him sleep. He was annoyed by the fear that knotted in his stomach and held all the muscles of his body hard and tense. It was unaccountable. Less than eight hours earlier he had accepted, without fear, that death was inevitable. And now, the hope that glimmered feebly in the promised light of dawn had made him fear again. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t death he was afraid of, but life.

The sound of bare feet slithered across the roof and McCue dropped lightly down in the open doorway. Elliot could see his dark form faintly silhouetted against the sky beyond. The American stepped in out of the rain, dripping on to the dry boards. ‘No point in keeping watch. We can’t see and we can’t be seen in this rain.’ He spoke quietly, but his voice seemed very close.

‘Sure,’ Elliot said.

‘D’you get anything on the radio?’

‘Voice of America, Radio Moscow, World Service.’

‘And?’

‘The Brits and the Yanks say the situation is confused. Moscow says the Khmer Rouge have abandoned the city and are fleeing north. The Vietnamese are expected to take Phnom Penh tomorrow.’

McCue shifted uneasily in the dark. ‘What do you think?’

Elliot took another draw on his cigarette. ‘I think things are bound to look confusing from a Bangkok massage parlour, which is where most of the American and British correspondents will be right now. The Russians’ll be getting their briefing from the front line.’

‘You still plan to go in before dawn?’

‘Have you got a better idea?’ The tension between them crackled like electricity in the dark.

‘You know the kid won’t be there.’

‘Sure.’

‘So what then?’

Elliot sighed and brushed the sweat from his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’ He sounded weary. ‘The woman and the girl shouldn’t have anything to fear from the Vietnamese.’

‘You ain’t suggesting we give ourselves up?’

Elliot raised a bottle to his lips and let warm flat beer run back over his throat. ‘Can’t say I particularly fancy an extended stay at the Hanoi Hilton.’

The Hanoi Hilton was the name given to the re-education centres in Hanoi where hundreds of American servicemen captured during the Vietnam war had been imprisoned and tortured, brainwashed into making public denouncements of their country’s involvement in the war. Many had eventually been released, but it was rumoured that many more still languished there.

‘So what are you suggesting?’ McCue’s voice was cold.

‘Seems to me,’ Elliot said, pulling the last lungful of smoke from his cigarette, ‘that our best hope is to reach the coast, try and get across the Gulf of Thailand.’

‘Shit, man! How are we gonna do that with an old lady and a young girl in tow?’

Elliot shook his head. ‘We can’t.’

There was a long silence. When at last he spoke, McCue’s voice was brittle and flinty. ‘You’re saying we dump them.’

‘Even if we could take them with us, they wouldn’t go. Not without the boy.’ Elliot’s voice was calm and even. There was no hint of defensiveness in it. He was simply stating the facts as he saw them. He wasn’t prepared for McCue’s lunge across the cabin, the hands that grabbed him in the dark. Hot breath hissed in his face.

‘You bastard, Elliot! If you were ready to dump them, what the fuck are we doing here? What did Mikey die for?’

For the first time in many hours all Elliot’s tension fell away. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t.’ And somehow the words relieved him of the burden. ‘Things just didn’t work out the way I planned.’

‘Fuck you!’ McCue raised his eyes to the ceiling in frustration and he let go of Elliot to slump back into the chair. He thought about Lotus, and his baby who would be asleep now on the rush mat in the back room of his klong house. Tears welled in his eyes with the realization that the boy would never know his real father, that Lotus would probably take another husband. That he was, after all, going to die. He sat limp, his arms dangling loose at his sides. ‘When I don’t need you any more, Elliot,’ he said softly, ‘you’re a dead man.’

Elliot’s face glowed red, briefly, in the flare of the match he struck to light another cigarette. ‘You’re too late Billy,’ he said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘I died a long time ago.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘Have you known La Mère Grace long?’ The fat smiling face of the General leaned closer beside her at the table, a confidential air in his voice. His attentive eyes twinkled into hers.

‘No, not long at all,’ Lisa said. ‘Less than a week, in fact.’

‘Ah,’ the General said, as if this was deeply significant and he was being made privy to a secret. ‘She is a fine woman,’ he added.

Lisa nodded. ‘Yes, she’s been very good to me.’

The General was a large man, tall by Asian standards, overweight but impressive in his army dress uniform. He had a fine head of thick steel-grey hair and black, bushy eyebrows above smiling eyes. His lips were a little too thick, purplish and wet. In his mid-fifties, he