they’d reached the American airfield, the old American base hidden in the mountains. The Secret City of the Raven War, where the secret American bombers took off, to drop their secret golden bomblets on the people in the plain.
He yawned, and felt a hit of nausea. Disorientation or altitude? He couldn’t tell. Rubbing the sleepy grit from his eyes, he got out of the car. Tou handed him a bottle of cold water.
Jake drank, thirstily, lustily. They had escaped – for the moment – but what now. And where was Yeng? And Chemda?
There. Down the road, in the clearing mist, between a clutch of Hmong dwellings, he could see Hmong men gathered: young men with guns and rifles and belts of ammo slung brigandishly over their backs. Hmong rebels. In the middle of them all was the slight, yet animated figure of Chemda, talking and gesturing.
That girl. She had grit and steel and guts and backbone and Jake felt, again, the stirrings of moral admiration not unmixed with plain desire. She was tough. A tough determined Khmer princess. Five foot two of royal Khmer energy. Her ancestors, Jake suspected, would have been proud.
Tou shook his head like something bad had happened.
‘What?’
‘Chemda ring her grandfather again. He say you go Luang. Then he save you.’ Tou pointed at the distant airfield. ‘The Stripe Hmong have plane, we can get you Luang, same same, no problem.’
‘OK, that’s good, isn’t it?’
Tou shook his head.
‘Chemda nearly cry. She not cry, but nearly. Sad.’
‘Why?’
‘People here know her face and they hear grandfather name. They tell her.’ Tou looked shyly at his own mudded broken trainers. Jake reminded himself to thank this boy, to thank this boy for saving their lives: but Tou was not for thanking, he was explaining everything: ‘Hmong lady she tell Chemda, she know her grandmother, royal Khmer lady, everyone know what happen to her. To grandmother. When the Khmer Rouge come to the Plain of Jars, in 19 . . . 19 . . .’
‘76.’
‘Yes. Then they do something to Chemda grandmother. They cut open her head. For . . .’ Tou searched for the word. ‘For an experimen? Medical experimen. In her head. Cut her head open like she was a goat, in market.’
Jake stared at Chemda down the road. What did it mean? Cutting open? Experiments?
A parakeet flashed overhead, cinnabar and yellow, screeching in fear of some unseen pursuer.
Chapter 9
The plane was waiting for them, parked on the muddy airstrip. From two hundred metres away Jake could count the seats. Four. Just a little four seater: tiny and old and functional. Jake wondered precisely what function the plane had, normally: crop spraying? Drug dealing? Arms smuggling?
He didn’t have time to ask. Already the propeller was turning. And the Hmong rebels escorting them to the tarmac wore extremely frayed and anxious smiles, keen to see them gone.
Jake stared at Tou and Yeng, who were talking quietly. He felt a tingle of suspicion. Someone had betrayed them back at Ponsavanh: the police had known where to find them. Could it be that Yeng had betrayed them? Tipped off a policeman? Twenty dollars was a lottery win in Laos. Maybe they had bought his loyalty.
But that didn’t make sense at all. Why go through all the pain of the last twenty-four hours, rescuing Tou and Chemda and Jake from the police, if Yeng’s immediate or even ultimate intention was to turn them over? So, no, it wasn’t Yeng.
They were approaching the airfield proper, passing a barricade of rusted, empty, Budweiser beer kegs. Jake marvelled at all the emptiness. What had once been the busiest airport in Indochina was now a museum of tropical weeds and concrete decay, surrounded by shacks adorned with ancient Coke signs rusted into a purple-red: vintage and resonant.
The whole place vibrated with memories, with jungly and luxuriant nostalgia: the air was moist with ghosts of young American pilots and dead Hmong heroes, and the whiff of marijuana and china white heroin, and big slangy guys in jeeps and talk of Charlie and LZs and Willy Peter – and cartridge players blasting the Doors –
He glanced back at Chemda. Her brown eyes were full of gratitude and weariness. Not the alertness she had shown, staring in the jars at Jar Site 9.
Jar. Site. Nine. This partial answer to the puzzle slid into place in Jake’s mind, with a satisfying exactitude. Jar Site 9! The Laos government knew perfectly well what had been discovered in Jar Site 9. And they were still protecting it. A communist government protecting what fellow communists had discovered in the 1970s. A final site that had been kept untouched, maybe for this American. Fishhook.
This made perfect sense. Jake and Chemda had already been conspicuous on the streets of Ponsavanh – he was virtually the only white guy in the city. Tourists were meagre. Then someone – it could have been anyone – had spotted them heading south, towards the Jars. This person told the police. Paranoid and dangerous, the thin and smiling Ponsavanh cops did their job: protecting Jar Site 9. They came after them.
But why did it mean so much to the authorities, and to Samnang, then and now? A bunch of old skulls and burned ribs in a jar?
Jake scanned the horizon – as if the answer would be hanging from the mango trees. There was no answer. Just a monkey hooting in the jungle; vaguely human, yet distinctly inhuman. A macaque? A gibbon? A langur? The jungle thronged with life. And there were Laotian soldiers in there, too, chasing down the last Hmong rebels. Not conscripts: real soldiers. Trained soldiers. Killers. Aiming their guns thisaway.
Now.
‘OK OK,’ Tou said, turning and calling to Jake. ‘Hurry. Please?’
They paced quickly across the concrete. Jake’s anxieties were winding ever tighter. They needed to be gone. But who had organized this? How were they going to repay the Hmong?
‘Chemda,’ he said, eyeing the plane. ‘How do we sort this out? I only have about a hundred bucks –’
‘My grandfather,’ she answered. She lifted her phone. ‘I have talked with him. Grandfather Sen is helping us . . . He has persuaded the Hmong –’
‘Come,’ Tou interrupted. ‘Come quick please quick.’
As they ran the last yards Jake remembered. And turned. ‘Yeng?’
The old man had halted. He shook his head. He was standing on the broken asphalt: he was not going to accompany them to the plane; instead he grasped Jake’s hand, and then Chemda’s, and then he cracked a weary smile and said Sabaydee.
His conscience tolling, Jake grabbed a fistful of dollars, virtually all of the dollars he had on him, and thrust them into Yeng’s hand. Yeng refused. Jake tried again.
Yeng accepted just ten dollars and said:
‘Kharb jai.’ Then he motioned with his free hand at the green mountains all around them, and he did a machine-gun action with two fingers pointing and shooting. ‘Pathet Lao! Bang bang!’
The phrase didn’t require interpretation. Jake raced the final ten yards to the plane. Chemda was already inside the minuscule cabin. The ‘pilot’ was another skinny grinning Hmong lad, barely eighteen, in ripped jeans stained with motor oil; he smelt faintly of last night’s lao-lao whisky. Jake reached for the ladder, but now he realized Tou was also dawdling. Backing away.
‘Tou? You’re not coming either?’
‘I stay here for . . . Luang no good. Police. My Hmong friend are here. Better for you go Luang.’
Reflexively, Jake once again reached in his pocket for cash. Tou frowned at the idea and the gesture. No! He didn’t want anything. Instead he stepped back and did a mock salute and he laughed:
‘Number one plane! Royal Hmong air force.’
Jake