Delta Green - [62]

“Not now, Kevin.”

He tried a smile. “Now’s a good time.”

“No.”

“Look, Amy, it’s my fault.”

“I’d like to blame you,” she said, “but I can’t. I’m like a damned schoolgirl when I get near you. So stay away”

“Look, hon, we’ve got a nice chemistry…”

“No longer.”

She was right. This wasn’t a good time to discuss themselves. Her mouth was frozen into a straight, grim line, and her pale eyes were opaque.

“All right, we’ll talk about it later.”

“Not now, not later.”

McKenna sighed. He liked her even better.

“How about business then?”

“What business?”

“Why are we going to Phnom Penh?”

“That’s where Shelepin and Pavel are,” she said.

“We’re going into the spy business? I thought that’s why Uncle paid the guys in the CIA.”

“We’re not going anywhere together. You’re the pilot, you wait at the airport for me.”

“That’s not going to happen, Amy”

“It sure as hell is.”

“Are you trying to prove yourself to Overton and Brackman? Overcome the little lapse? Is that it?”

“Of course not,” she said, but her voice faltered.

“Okay, you do what you want to do, but plan on having me with you.”

“No. You don’t outrank me anymore, Colonel McKenna.”

“But my date of rank precedes yours,” he said. “All that means is that I don’t let you do something foolish.”

“Go fly the airplane.”

He went back to the cockpit to fly the airplane.

“Little spat, compadre?”

“Go to hell, Tony.”

Munoz grinned at him. “She’ll get over it.”

McKenna started his letdown when he saw the southern tip of Vietnam, the Pointe de Ca Mau. He passed well south of it, staying out of Vietnamese airspace, then turned north toward Kampuchea.

He crossed the coast at twelve thousand feet.

“Feet dry,” Munoz said.

“Let’s try to keep them that way, Tiger.”

PHNOM PENH

Despite her earlier protestation, Pearson was glad to have McKenna and Munoz with her. Even dressed in civilian slacks and horribly flowered sport shirts, they looked tough enough to scare off muggers or other thugs.

The streets of Phnom Penh were a maelstrom of pedestrians, bicycles, minibuses, smoke-belching trucks, and randomly aimed automobiles. Munoz drove their rented Renault with dedication, irreverence for any international driving regulations, and a creative vocabulary. There was also a sign language that she thought was generally obscene.

The turmoil of decades of revolving governments, ranging from socialist to communist to anarchist to professed democratic, was evident in the faces of the shoppers and the shopkeepers. Their faces were stoic masks, afraid that the next interrogation would be from another resurgence of the Khmer Rouge who, in 1975, seized control of the government. They corralled all of the noted members of the previous regimes, hostile Cambodians, and pro-Vietnamese citizens and executed them all. Renamed from Cambodia to the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the government? was composed of various political factions which maintained an uneasy coalition and frequently charged that Vietnam had left troops behind disguised as soldiers of Kampuchea.

The economy was in chaos. Under Pol Pot in 1975, banks had been closed and currency abolished. Foreign trade vanished. Now, after the drawn-out Vietnamese with drawal, the economy was undergoing refurbishment, and help was accepted anywhere it was offered. From the expatriot Shelepin and his colleagues, for example.

Foreigners with money to invest in business and industry were readily accepted, and close looks at their backgrounds were forsaken.

Pearson had researched that much. Now, she was going to take a close look at the reality.

Munoz dodged a bicycle that shot out of an alley, and the car slammed into a chuckhole. Pearson bounced high off the backseat, hitting her head on the roof.

“¡Puta!”

“Wasn’t a woman, Tony,” McKenna, who was sitting in the front seat, said.

“Drove like one.”

Normally, Pearson would have had a retort for Munoz’s chauvinism, knowing his statements were meant good-naturedly. Today, she didn’t have one. She was still coming down from her self-recrimination high.

They crossed an intersection so jammed with vehicles that McKenna suggested bailing out and walking, but Munoz finally got them through it, then turned left at the next intersection and followed a street that paralleled the Tonle Sap River, north of its junction with the Mekong.

The maze of streets, many of them unmarked, was so confusing that, once again, she was glad to have the two men with her. They had both been here before.

“How close do we want to get?” Munoz asked.

“Not too close with the car,” Pearson told hint.

“You happen to see somethin’ looks like a parkin’ place, hit me in the head, will you?”

“Try the next alley,” McKenna said.

Munoz whipped a hard right, bounced over the sidewalk, and slid to a stop next to a plaster-walled building. Overflowing garbage cans swarmed with flies. Washing was hung out to dry on lines strung high over the alley. Small children rushed to greet them, hands out.

Pearson couldn’t open the door on the right because the wall of the building was four inches away. They all got out on the left, locked the car, and McKenna gave four kids a handful of riels to watch the car.