The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Peter May (intellectual books to read .txt) 📖

lit a cigarette. ‘Shoulda killed us all when you had the chance, Elliot,’ he said grimly. ‘We’re as good as dead now.’

As the moon rose, they drifted, helpless, further out into the watery vastness of the Tonle Sap. Elliot knew that he had finally lost control of his own destiny. If there was a God, then they were all in his hands. He felt no fear, just an inner numbness, as when a man has swallowed a bottle of pills and succumbs drowsily to the onset of the final sleep. His mind turned away from looking back on the wasteland of his life, and there seemed little point in looking forward, since he could see no further than the dark night that surrounded them. He took a final draw on his cigarette and threw the last inch of it away into the night, hearing the briefest sizzle as it hit the water. Fatigue engulfed him. He turned at the sound of a whisper at his side, and found himself looking into Ny’s pale, moonlit face.

‘We going to die?’ Her voice seemed very tiny.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We all die sometime.’

She dropped her eyes and shook her head in frustration. ‘No, I mean . . .’

‘I know what you meant,’ he interrupted her.

‘Then, why—’

‘Because I don’t know!’ There was irritation in his voice.

A long silence in the dark. Then, ‘My mamma is shamed of me,’ she said. Elliot glanced quickly at the dark shape of the older woman lying sleeping in the bottom of the boat. ‘Because I kill man.’

‘Are you ashamed of yourself?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Her voice was hard. ‘He deserve to die.’

Elliot shrugged. ‘Lot of people do.’

‘Like your friend Mistah Slattery?’

A seed of anger grew for a moment inside him, but failed to germinate. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He didn’t deserve to die.’

‘But you kill him.’

‘I’ve killed too many people to draw distinctions.’

‘I no understand.’

He sighed. ‘No. Most people don’t.’

‘But if he no deserve to die, why you kill him?’

For a moment he studied the earnest child’s dark eyes that genuinely sought answers, and wondered why it should matter to her. Then it struck him that his daughter would probably have asked the same questions, and he was glad he would never have to face her, never have to tell her the truth, or face it himself.

‘If you are a soldier, if you are prepared to kill – for whatever reason – you must be prepared to be killed.’

‘And you are soldiers? You and your friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘I no understand. What is your army?’

Elliot searched for another cigarette, then remembered he’d smoked the last one. ‘We have no army,’ he said irritably. ‘We are soldiers of fortune.’ And he pre-empted her ‘No understand’ by adding, ‘We do it for money.’

‘You kill to live.’

Elliot nodded. ‘Yeah, I suppose you could put it that way.’

‘Why?’

Why, indeed, he wondered. He remembered his pride in donning his first uniform, his determination to excel in training, his aspirations to leadership. And then, the grim reality of action. He closed his eyes and, as the red mist dispersed, saw again the bodies of women and children lying dead and dying in the fly-infested heat. ‘Governments train you,’ he said, ‘to defend your country, they tell you. A proud tradition, a heritage of freedom. War, they say, is about the nobility of one man sacrificing himself for the freedom of another. And so you go and kill people in the name of freedom and you believe you are right. And maybe sometimes you are. But when you find yourself a long way from home, in a strange land where the people see you not as a liberator but as a jailer, perhaps you begin to question who is right and who is wrong. And then all that matters is survival. You kill in order not to be killed. If you stop to think about it, you die. So you stop thinking. And then you just kill. After all, it’s what they trained you for.’

A shiver ran through him, a quick unaccountable chill in the heat of the night.

‘And when they have no further use for you, you find it hard to stop. It’s what you know, it’s what you do best. It has become a habit. So you sell yourself to whoever will buy. No proud tradition, no heritage of freedom.’ He paused. ‘No hypocrisy.’ He smiled without humour, a heavy irony in his chuckle. ‘For what we do we would once have been heroes. Now we are despised.’

‘Despised?’ Her brow crinkled in a frown of confusion.

‘Hated.’ He wondered how much she had really understood, wondered what it mattered how little she did.

‘And you no mind?’

He smiled at the absurdity of her question. ‘What’s to mind?’

‘If you choose be hated,’ she said solemnly, ‘then no one love you.’

Elliot’s smile faded. ‘That’s right, little girl,’ he said. ‘No one loves you.’

They sat in silence for a long, long time, and Elliot thought how comforting the night was, the dark wrapped around them a cloak of safety, all things hidden from the world. Ironic that they should be safe in the dark, the stuff of most men’s nightmares. It was with the light, he knew, that danger would come, perhaps death. He glanced at the child’s face beside him and felt awkward in the presence of such innocence, an innocence that could kill, incorruptible in its silent accusation. And yet, he knew, it was not her innocence that accused, but his guilt. ‘You should sleep,’ he advised.

Her eyes were unflickering as they gazed off into the blackness. ‘Every time I close eyes I see his face,’ she said. ‘He was so – surprise. Did he really think I love him? Did he think I choose to go with him all those time?’

And now Elliot realized why she had done it, and he too wondered at the cadre’s surprise. He was aware of the turn of her head, her eyes watching him for a long moment, almost as though she knew what had gone