ADAM HALL - Quiller Salamander

It was 17:23, with the late sun lowering across the skyline, when I decided it was time to take action. Flockhart had wanted to know the whereabouts of General Kheng and he now had that information, but it was beginning to look as if Kheng might have come here to stay the night at headquarters, bringing the deadline down to zero. If there were a conceivable chance of jumping ahead of him I wanted to take it, get information for Control, this time as to where Kheng would go next — back to the capital, out to the camp in the foothills here or to the main Khmer Rouge base in the jungle. Whatever Flockhart had in his mind, this information could now be critical, conclusive, as time ran out.

I flashed my parking lights twice, and waited.

Symes came up from behind the van and put his face in the window.

'Look,' I said, 'there's something else I've got to do, so if I leave here at any time don't worry, just stay with the target wherever he goes. He was the leader of the group who got out of the chopper and his name is General Kheng. Signal the DIF as soon as you possibly can at every stage if he starts moving. Questions?'

'If he gets on a plane?'

'Find out where it's going and signal the DIF from the Air Services office.'

'Roger.'

He went back to his jeep.

It was an hour before I could make a move.

In the mirror I saw a Chinese jeep leaving the KR headquarters with an officer at the wheel, unescorted, and as it passed the end of the street I started up and took two rights and a left and saw the jeep bouncing over the potholes fifty yards ahead and took up the tail. It was following the same route as Colonel Choen had taken, but I needed to talk to this officer long before we reached the camp.

There were fewer buildings now, a few huts, then a wasteland of scrub and after a few miles a huddle of broken concrete slabs that might have been buildings once, before the revolution, their walls scarred with shrapnel and dead palm trees leaning across them. One of the buildings still stood, fissured and windowless, and I thought it looked suitable, well out of earshot from the nearest habitation and some way from the road.

The Chinese jeep was half a mile in front and it took two miles to catch up and overtake, and as I went past it I used the horn and held my hand up, asking the driver to stop, cutting in a little to reinforce the message as I hit the brakes and ran the van into the scrub and switched off the engine.

Then I left it there and trotted back to the jeep. The KR was sitting at the wheel with his right hand on the butt of his revolver so I relaxed him a little by introducing myself.

' Je suis un collegue de Slavsky!'

' Eh bien?'

I didn't say any more because I was close enough now and used a half-fist to his carotid artery to cut off the blood to the brain for a few seconds and then caught him as he keeled over, taking him round to the passenger seat and propping him there and slipping the gun out of its holster and pushing it into my belt. He was waking up a little now and I worked on the thyroid cartilage, enough to make him fight for breath, and while he was doing that I took the jeep in a U-turn and gunned up.

He was fluent in French then, hadn't asked me to repeat what I'd said; this I would have expected in a man of his rank: he wore captain's insignia.

There was cover for the jeep under some slabs of fallen concrete and I got the captain's assault rifle and the big flashlight from the back and slapped his forehead with a slack back-fist to shock the pineal gland as he tried to throw me with a thrust to the back of the knees, been sleeping like a fox, one eye open.

'Don't do that,' I told him in French, beginning tuition with the basics. 'I don't want you doing things like that.' He could understand, could hear me well enough, I knew that; he was just disorientated by the pineal strike: it's what we use it for.

The sun was down as I dragged him into the windowless building; the ground floor room had possibly been intended for storage: there was just the open doorway and a floor littered with debris thrown into relief by the flashlight — broken concrete and rusted iron bars and dead birds and a small skeleton the size of a rat. The doorway faced the scrub on the other side from the road, so the light wouldn't be seen by the traffic as the night came down.

Somewhere there was a cricket singing.

'Who are you?' the captain asked. His speech was slurred.

He was heavily built for an Asian, had muscle, would be well trained, probably, but not in unarmed combat: he should have gone for the coccyx out there, not the knees, could have paralyzed me if he'd done it fast.

'I don't want any questions,' I said.

'You told me you were a colleague of Slavsky's.'

'No questions — and that is the last time I'm going to tell you anything twice. Kneel down over there with your back to the wall.' I swung the assault rifle up. 'Do it now.'

The weapon seemed to impress him and he backed off against the wall but didn't kneel, stood watching me like a jungle cat, furious, a man of pride, what the shrink we use in training at Norfolk would categorize as strong, excitatory. Pride was something I could use, work on, given enough time.

I backed away too, as far as the opposite wall, and dropped the assault rifle and the revolver onto the floor, then moved towards the captain again until I was within striking distance.

'There are things you've got to understand,' I said. 'You're quite an educated man, and can probably think well, so it won't be difficult. You need to understand that you're my captive, and that there's nothing you can do, nothing at all, to free yourself. You must also understand that the only time I shall injure you is when you ask for it. Only then.'

He went on watching me. I'd put the flashlight on the floor to one side, its beam directed towards him. It shadowed his face, making it look like a mask lit obliquely to give it drama; the light was reflected in his narrowed, amber eyes. It would take days to break a man like this one physically. It could be done; it can always be done; but I hadn't got days, only a few hours. The quickest way would be to destroy him from the inside, reduce his persona, his creaturehood, to nothing.

'I told you to kneel,' I said, 'and this is the second time.' He tried to block it but wasn't fast enough and the strike rocked his head back and it hit the wall and for a moment I thought I'd misjudged things, used too much force, but he didn't go out, he just stood watching me, surprise in his eyes, I'd started to make him think. There wasn't any blood: it had just been a hammer-fist to the forehead.

'Remember,' I told him, 'you'll be injured only when you ask for it. Kneel.'

I gave him a few seconds but he didn't move, watched me with the anger coming back into his eyes now that he could think straight again, so I went across to the opposite wall to fetch the assault rifle, turning my back to him, already hunched over to the correct degree so that as he made his run I went straight into a basic aikido roll that flung him against the wall, then caught him as he came down so that he didn't land anywhere near the two guns.

'Don't do things like that,' I told him. 'I don't want you to do things like that. You need to think more, with your brain instead of your gut. This is an intellectual exercise we're doing together, can't you see that by now?'

He didn't answer, mainly because he'd hit the wall with quite a lot of impact and it had left him disoriented.

The man who teaches interrogation techniques at Norfolk is a Chinese, Yang Taifang. The Chief of Signals had him pulled out of a prison in the Province of Fukien when no one was looking, because the first two or three years of his thirteen-year sentence had been spent under intensive interrogation, so he knows which end the flint goes in. 'Must remember,' he says, 'not much good talking to subject when fully conscious. Must first disorientate, and this easy. Save excellent amount of time this way.' He can't speak too clearly because of what they did to his face: some of the motor nerves are gone; but mentally he's still very bright and his memory is sharp. 'First, disorientate,' he says, using his own verbal spelling. 'Then humiliate, especially if subject proud man, like soldier.'