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

came in with a pot of steaming rice and set it on the floor. McCue’s gaze settled on the sticky brown grains and his smile faded.

‘The last supper,’ he said.

*

Small campfires flickered in the dark, ravaged brown faces huddled around the flames, more for comfort than for warmth. Occasional troop carriers rattled down the broad boulevards. Jumpy sentries nervously fingered the triggers of automatic weapons, small heads in pudding-bowl helmets. Smoke rose all across the city like clouds of luminous mist. During the day, thousands of newly liberated Cambodians had drifted in from the south, in search of food, friends, relatives – the past. And now, an uneasy silence had settled on the city, like dust; fear and hunger and weariness afflicting both the liberators and the liberated.

Hau could still feel the burn of his mother’s lips on his cheek, the fingers that trembled on his shoulders as she told him to be careful. He had shrugged free of her embrace, embarrassed by her show of affection in the presence of the tall foreigners. He was no longer a child. He was a soldier, a man. As his sister had stepped forward to kiss him, he had taken a step back, maintaining a distance, and made a little solemn bow. And with a nod to the tall ones, he had turned and led them into the dark suburban night, Kalashnikov clutched tight to his chest.

He led them through a maze of empty streets that were as familiar to him as they were unfamiliar to them. He felt good knowing that they were so completely dependent upon him. He took long, loping strides, moving easily through the humid night air, glancing back from time to time to make sure they were still there. And each time he was struck anew, almost shocked, by Elliot’s height. To him he seemed huge; a round-eyed giant with strange, pale skin.

He had only the haziest recollection of the Americans who had once moved freely about the streets of Phnom Penh, and regretted that he had not been old enough to learn to speak their language. What little French he had known was gone for ever. He had felt jealous of his mother and sister, how they could speak to these men. He knew they had saved their lives, and he had been puzzled by his mother’s hostility towards them. Surely they were to be admired: tough, strong, seemingly invincible, like the soldiers in the American movies he had seen before his life had been torn up by the roots. He felt both proud and safe in their company, and he enjoyed the respect with which they treated him. They had saved his family from the Khmer Rouge. It was his duty to save them from the Vietnamese.

It took them nearly an hour, skirting the campfires around the fringes of the city centre, to reach the highway that would take them south-west towards the deep-water port of Kompong Som. They lay in wait for more than fifteen minutes watching a convoy of trucks heading out along the highway, before an unnatural silence fell upon the west of the city. The sky had clouded over, virtually obliterating the moon. You could very nearly touch the darkness. They crouched, huddled together, behind the wall of a derelict factory, creeper growing up all around them where it had broken through the cracked pavings. The only sounds the creaking of the cicadas and the whine of mosquitoes.

Hau could feel the heat from the bodies of the two men, could smell their sweat, see it glistening on their faces. He wished he was going with them, that he did not have to go back. After all, what was there to go back to? But he had a sense of duty, too, towards his mother and sister. He was the man. It was up to him to look after them. He felt the hand of the American slip into his and grasp it firmly. ‘Thanks, kid.’ And for some unaccountable reason Hau felt tears well in his eyes and he was glad it was dark. His sense of safety was slipping away, and he felt less like the man and soldier he wanted to be, and more like the small boy he was.

The taller of the two soldiers, the one his mother had called English – a concept of which Hau had no grasp – pressed something small and hard into his hand. He looked down to see the tiny figure of St Christopher, bowed by the load on its back, and looked up quickly to find the Englishman’s eyes hidden in shadow. He clutched it tightly in his hand and felt strangely moved. The big man ruffled his hair and both men moved out from the cover of the wall and off into the night, silent shadows quickly swallowed by the dark.

A voice called out somewhere away to the right, a high-pitched voice, nasal and shrill. An engine roared loudly in the dark, and lights flooded the road beyond the wall. Hau pressed his back against the brick, and heard the clatter of hard soles on tarmac. Almost immediately the night erupted in a blaze of fire and noise. Giants in silhouette flickered across the factory’s flaking wall, crouched and running. The whine of mosquitoes was replaced by the whine of bullets pinging off concrete surfaces. To Hau, pressed in sudden terror against the brick, the shadows on the factory wall seemed to grow massively in size, huge dark spirits advancing through the night towards him. He watched, transfixed in horror, as their definition melted at the last, diverging and vanishing. The footsteps ran clattering off to the left and right. The harsh rattle of automatic fire fibrillated in the still night air: five, six, seven bursts that seemed to come from all around, echoing back off the factory wall. Above the roar Hau thought he heard the grunt of a human voice, the thud of a body on tarmac.

Then the