Quiller Salamander

I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but this has just come in from a British intelligence agent in Cambodia.

What the hell, he trusts it'll leave me convinced? Who is this guy?

I don't know, sir, but he could have gone loco, you know, jungle fever, it's pretty hot there right now.

Get this fucking thing out you've got one more fucking minute before they're here.

Sure. But there may be something in it. Tell him we gotta have photographs, okay? Tell him to get pictures.

Not coming out so I kicked the side of the camera to stress the frame back to a rectangle, parallelogram now, shit shaped, the sweat ru

Twisted the cap of the fuel tank open and made sure none of the stuff spilled onto me, dipped the belt in and pulled it out again and flicked the wheel of the lighter and flung myself clear and hit the jungle floor and burrowed through the undergrowth as the Sikorsky blew like a sunrise, kept on burrowing through the cool darkness of the leaves, the monkeys screaming now.

I suppose I had come three or four miles, burrowing at first and then getting onto my feet and stumbling through the dark entangling undergrowth, tripping many times on creeper, going down and smelling the fibrous soil against my face, rich and moist from the recent rain.

Now I was leaning against a palm trunk, watching the glow in the distance as Khay's funeral pyre burned low. He would have wanted cremation, according to Buddhist custom, and would have enjoyed the fact that torching the Sikorsky had given them something to focus on, the men in battledress, to hold their attention while I got clear. He would have left nothing for them in the ashes, no metal badge or insignia; he had known our sortie would perhaps bring us into direct contact with the Khmer Rouge.

Black smoke hung in a cloud above the trees, sometimes smothering the moon and then clearing again as the night air flowed, drawing out the smoke in skeins. I still listened for voices, for the clink of weaponry, but heard nothing, saw nothing of any light.

After a while I moved on again, heading east towards the nearest bullock track, and it was when I was tripped again by jungle creeper and went down with my hands spread out in front of me to break the fall that I felt a squirming beneath one of them, the left one if I remember, and then the rapid and repeated shock of the strike against my wrist, and when I hit the thing away I saw a long thin trickle of green against the jungle floor, and remembered what Gabrielle had said.

20: SKULLS

There are snakes in the river.

My spine arched again to a spasm and I lay like that, curved against the earth with my face to the sky, lay like that for I didn't know how long, the sweat pouring from me.

They swim across at night — the light attracts them, and the rats.

I slumped again like a drawn bow snapping, and the fever began. I had been expecting it.

Especially the hanuman — do you know it? The bright green one, quite small but more deadly thane cobra, even the king cobra.

Another spasm struck and I became arched, drawn taut, powerless to move, to relax the muscles. It was begi

Were there more of those things here? Did that one have a mate, and if so, how far was it from where I was lying? I couldn't do with more, with more than one. They are more deadly than the cobra.

One simply has to relax. Khay, the late Captain Khay. Western people drink whole bottle of whisky, sometimes works. Meditation best.

Soon after this — hours? I didn't know — the shaking began, and the delirium.

There were nine moons when the storm came roaring into the jungle and I counted them as the trees bent low under the force of the whipping wind, nine in a circle, circling, a giddy-go-round of white-lit moons, spi

Pain was there, and this comforted me: the nerves were not yet numbed, could still serve the organism. The pain was in the left hand, wrist, arm, burning, as if I'd plunged them into fire. I got onto my feet again and flayed my arm around, filling the dark with flames, touching the trees until they too took fire and the storm sent sparks flying, seized the flames and hurled them in hot bright ba

Meditate, he, the man with the unremembered name, had said.

Crashing to the earth with the legs buckling, lying across a creeper, a long thin — oh Jesus Christ I can't do with more of — a thin, unmoving creeper, let go then, and meditate, fear nothing and fear not fear, reach for the silence, the stillness, the domain of the unified field, of universal consciousness and love, let go, let go, and drift into the void where everything is nothing, and nothing everything, let go.

But this halcyon respite has not been for long, has it, our good friend, for we are ru

To find the bullock track.

A ray of sanity there, my masters, there's thought left somewhere in the fevered brain, squealing like a rat on fire for attention, the bullock track, yea, verily, in the name of the salamander: the bullock track and the road to Pouthisat and London, you must be out of your bloody mind, the veins are full of that thing's venom and the nerves are ru