Gideon's War / Hard Target

As he pushed his head into the duct, Kate climbed up behind him. The shelf swayed and groaned. But it didn’t fall. He could feel her pressed against him now, one arm encircling his hips. It had been a long time since he’d been this close to a woman. The urgency of the situation made theirs a strange intimacy.

He heard a crash behind him, followed by a muffled curse. “You okay?”

“The shelf fell,” she said. He grabbed her wrist and yanked, bracing his feet against the sides of the duct.

After a moment her hips cleared the sides of the access panel and she shot forward, landing on top of him between his legs. They were so tightly wedged that Gideon could barely move. But they froze completely when a weak light suddenly burst up from the access panel.

They could hear someone moving around in the storage room below, kicking things and spitting out words in Malay that sounded like expletives. It was obvious the jihadis were as frustrated by the darkness as Gideon and Kate had been.

Gideon felt Kate’s shallow breathing against his chest. Her entire wet body was trembling—whether from cold or fear he wasn’t sure—as the jihadi continued to slam around in the room below them. Then the light disappeared, and the door thudded shut.

Slowly Kate’s body relaxed. Her head dropped into the crook of his neck. He felt her warm breath against his shoulder, and her hair fell over his face. She smelled like soap. For a moment she molded her body around his, an impulsive gesture that kindled a warmth inside Gideon he hadn’t felt in a long time. As much as he wanted to surrender to it, he knew he couldn’t. Not now.

“We need to move,” he said.

She stiffened, pushed herself away from him. “Yeah. Definitely. We better go.”

Gideon crawled forward, pushed open the panel on the far end of the duct, and found himself at the bottom of a long shaft about four feet square and seventy-five feet high. A steel ladder ran up the side all the way to the top. Every ten feet or so there was a small access door, each one with a large letter stenciled on it to show which deck it led to. A fine mist fell on Gideon’s face as he looked up, rain driven by the wind through a vent at the top of the shaft.

CLUNK.

The entire rig shook as the ominous sound echoed through the shaft.

“What is that noise?” he said. She hadn’t answered his question the last time he’d asked her about it.

“The damping system which is supposed to keep the rig from swaying too much in heavy seas is defective. Long term, it could mess up this rig pretty seriously. But right now we’ve got bigger worries.”

Kate began to climb past him. Gideon followed. The shaft echoed with the deep howling of the wind blowing over the top. By the time they reached the hatch for A Deck, the noise of the wind was deafening.

They climbed into the hallway and shut the hatch, walking as swiftly and silently as they could until theyep Ñ€† reached a door at the end of the empty corridor. Gideon followed Kate inside.

“Wow,” Gideon said, surveying the back wall, stacked with conduit, electrical boxes, breakers, switches. A pegboard hung from the side wall, containing every kind of tool he could think of—and a lot he’d never seen before. “You guys don’t fool around.”

She gave him a wry look as she slipped into a pair of grease-stained coveralls with the Trojan Energy logo on the sleeve. “When you’re a hundred miles from shore on a rig with operating costs ru

As Gideon selected tools from the pegboard and shoved them into a canvas bag, Kate said, “So you still haven’t told me—where does a guy like you learn how to defuse bombs.”

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“We have a couple of minutes,” Kate said. “They’re still searching for me on D Deck, so we can’t go back there just yet.”

It was true: there was nothing they could do but hunker down while the jihadis scoured D Deck, looking for Kate. He might as well tell her the story while they waited. It would be something to help them both pass the time.

“You ever heard of the Tampuan?” he said.

“The what?”

“It’s actually a who. . .”

The day after he ended his relationship with Miriam, Gideon flew to Cambodia to negotiate an end to one of those civil wars that remain unknown to most people outside the conflict zone and never make the front page of any newspapers.

Gideon explained to Kate that if you looked at a map of Southeast Asia, you’d see Cambodia in the middle of a semicircle of nations including Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos. Each of those countries has its own predominant ethnic group—the Khmer in Cambodia, the Laotians in Laos, the Thais in Thailand. But hunched in the middle of Southeast Asia lay a range of high, formidable mountains. And in those mountains were a host of obscure ethnic groups totally unrelated to the dominant ethnicities of each country. Cham, Kuy, Rhade, Jarai, Hmong— the list was long. Cambodia alone had nearly ten ethnic minorities. And in Ratanakiri Province was one of the smallest and most isolated of these groups, the Tampuan.

There were only 25,000 in all of Southeast Asia, most of them in Cambodia.

During the hellish Pol Pot regime, the Tampuan formed a resistance movement. Once Pol Pot and his cronies got pushed out, the Tampuan Liberation Front continued to fight against the central government, dominated by Khmer out of Phnom Penh. It was what the UN termed a “low-level” conflict, which was nothing but bureaucrat-speak for a war where the people who got killed didn’t own television stations or newspapers.

Eventually the Tampuan and the Cambodian government incurred enough casualties and economic damage to reach the same conclusion: their little war was not worth continuing. Under the best of circumstances, winding down a civil war is a tricky business, but the vested interests between these warring parties had cby Ñ€†reated a Gordian knot that most people in the State Department thought would be impossible to untangle. That none of the representatives on either side had the authority to make any real decisions made it even more challenging.

Gideon quickly discovered that patience is a diplomat’s greatest virtue. He would alternately listen and talk and then listen some more, for hours and hours, until the hours became days, and the negotiating parties went back to their superiors to redraw their respective bottom lines. During these breaks, Gideon would sometimes play soccer with the children in the village where the negotiations were taking place.

A significant factor in the negotiations was that Pol Pot had fought the Tampuan by planting mines on every road and trail and water buffalo path in Tampuan territory. As a result, northeastern Cambodia contained more mines per square mile than any place in the world. Twenty years after Pol Pot’s death, the Tampuan were still being blown up almost daily. And most of the victims were children.

Children chase balls into the jungle. They go off the beaten path. They lack the caution of adults. And they paid the price, sometimes losing their limbs or their eyes or, most often, their lives.

As part of the emerging agreement he was negotiating, Gideon convinced the international community to send in teams of bomb specialists to defuse the mines. There were police from the Fi

A bomb disposal expert named Horst soon arrived in the village. A large ex-Spetsnaz sergeant, he turned out to be a very good bomb guy, except for the regular and substantial doses of medicinal vodka he required to steady his nerves. But the occasional by-product of his alcohol abuse were hands that trembled as if he had Parkinson’s disease. Which was something of a liability in the bomb-disarming business.